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Beckett and Eros: Death of Humanism

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Since I wrote the review that appears below, I have found another book in the Continuum Studies series called Beckettt's Books, which does what the book reviewed does not, and I strongly argue that it should have done:

I have just ordered it from Amazon, so can only judge by the pages available on the 'Look inside' feature, but it actually seems to look not only at what Beckettt is known to have read, but also at the thought and philosophy that can be proved (not least from his note-books) to have influenced him at around and after the time of Murphy, as against the mere ascription of his awareness of material for which the author only argues a resemblance in Beckettt's published canon. Scholarship is, at this level, a matter of proof, not idle conjecture!

* * * * *

This is not a book for the general reader, or for someone causally wanting to know something about one of the twentieth century's greatest writers of both prose and plays. It is littered with the author's learning (a bit as is Beckettt's own early literary criticism and prose writing), and so the words 'mythograph' / 'mythographic' and 'diegesis [italics]' occur within half-a-page (p. 155), as if it is only through some special language of criticism that anyone can write about someone else's work and seek to explain his or her theories about it: the reader must either know - or learn - this language, or, I suggest, founder.

And the author abounds with theories, but without necessarily putting them to the test. For any reader who might have had the occasion to read his chapter in the 'Cambridge Companion to Beckettt', there is further dilation, though not necessarily elucidation, about [what is said to be] the Cartesian world-view. In the Cambridge chapter, the effect was of having a person offer to bring light onto a subject (in this case, the trilogy of novels Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable) by taking, as one's starting-point, another subject, i.e. Cartesian philosophy, and, without clearly setting out an account of what that is, using it as a means of talking about the original topic. (The quip about Coleridge needing to explain his exlanations does not seem out of place.)

Furthermore, just as the author does not seem to think it necessary to demonstrate that Beckettt was actually familiar in such detail with Cartesian thought (he published a controversial poem concerning Descartes, but that does not, in itself, show how deeply he did read in his philosophical or other writings), he finds similarities with Buddhist practice and teaching ('We might recall for a moment how dzogchen [italics] teaching revises and strips down the concept of Buddhist 'refuge' (which is normally thought to mean belonging to a group, the sangha [italics]', p. 216), and, again, talks about these writings (Beckettt's and the Buddhist tradition) as if Beckettt self-evidently knew of the latter just because elements of the former appear to resemble their content.

The theory-making is predicated, seemingly, not on a scholarly approach that proves what Beckettt himself had actually read and knew, but finding parallels and then assuming that one must have been written with an eye to the other. Quite apart from which, the author is so wrapped up in his esoteric terminology, and Cartesian and Buddhist references, that he does not make the effort to make the readability of his book foremost. At the beginning of chapter 13 (Open Sky Mind), for instance, he refers to Cascando, the play for radio. After a passing reference to a stage-play, That Time, he asks a question, and then refers to another play for radio, Rough for Radio II (it is actually not that work, but Rough for Radio I, from which he then quotes), to answer it. However, he does not trouble to indicate when he is reverting to talking about Cascando: is it, though he does not say so, when he writes 'Here we as readers are not really permitted to forget, any more than is the speaker', and why is he talking about a play as if it is a text, rather than a script intended for performance, and so to be heard, not specifically read?

In fact, the author is just treating this script as a text on which to base his theories about 'the inner compulsion to peel away the multiplicity of false selves from his awareness so as to be left with the pure light, the void of the Buddhist rigpa [italics] (p. 198)'. Some readers might feel that, if it is a matter of 'false selves', the unfounded assertion of an origin of Beckettt's writing in Buddhism is just another one...