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INTRODUCTION
SAMUEL BECKETT: The Language of Self is as much a book about its subtitle as its main title. In fact, the attention to them is almost equally divided. While I do not want to give the impression that Beckett merely serves as a text, his work is so strikingly an example of the "fin de partie" introspection so characteristic of recent literature that a study of him must take it rather elaborately into account.
The idea of this book grew out of an extended study, begun in 1957 and still in process, of the variants of death imagery and symbolism in modern literature. The third division of that book is called simply Self, but it involves elaborate speculations upon the fate of introspection in recent literature. Beckett's novels and plays seemed continuously to occur as the best, the most representative, illustrations of one aspect of that history. I became interested in him not merely because he has recently acquired a reputation, chiefly among theatre-goers--though surely the popular success of Waiting for Godot is a meaningful detail in recent intellectual history. His chief fascination lies in his having exhaustively explored a special variant of the drama of the self.
I have tried to define, in Chapters 1 and 2, the two major metaphors of twentieth-century self-analysis. The first of these is radically assertive of the powerful doubts hindering stir-esteem in nineteenth-century literature. My discussion of it follows a line of descent from Dostoevsky Notes from the Underground through late nineteenth-century examples to Kafka. There are special characteristics: The kinds of selfassertion and self-analysis expressed within it are highly emotional, melodramatic in a special sense. They argue a metaphysical despair which is stimulated by profoundly personal doubts of certain theological assurances. The point of almost alt of the examples I have given in Chapter 1 is that the hero is personally engaged in a highly charged battle against both the rational "disease of consciousness" and the romantic doubts of divinity. I should call this type of selfanalysis metaphysical and moral; this is true despite the elaborate semiepistemological discourse at the beginning of Notes from the Underground. The literary frame of these assertions is still recognizably traditional, though the drama contained within it may not be.
While this tine of development is in large part dramatic, moral, and in a special sense "humanistic," the other major type of literary self-analysis is not. Or, it is not any of these things in any conventional literary sense. Instead, it is disputatious, inquisitive, and discursive. It is, in short, a kind of disquisition upon present residual elements of rationalism. I suppose a primary difference may be seen in the views taken in each case of the several metaphors of Christ, the Incarnation, the anthropomorphic prospects outlined in Christian theology. As I have tried to show in Chapter 1, a major crisis occurs when the divinity of Christ is seriously and emotionally questioned. If Christ after all shares our humanity, and if we cannot hope to profit from His divinity, then we are thrown into a desperate confusion of theological claims and counter-claims.
