Into the breach : Samuel Beckett and the ends of literature

189 Pages·1990·7.872 MB·English

by  Beckett, Samuel <>, Beckett, Samuel <> / Innommable, Beckett, Samuel <> / Malone meurt, Beckett, Samuel <> / Molloy, Beckett, Samuel <> - Œuvres romanesques, Trezise, Thomas, Beckett, Samuel

Into the Breach

Into the Breach
SAMUEL BECKETT AND THE
ENDS OF LITERATURE
Thomas Trezise
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY
Copyright © 1990 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,
Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Oxford
AU Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Catalogmg-in-Publication Data
Trezise, Thomas, 1953-
Into the breach : Samuel Beckett and the ends of
literature I Thomas Trezise.
Includes index.
1. Beckett, Samuel, 1906— —Fictional works.
2. Beckett, Samuel, 1906- Molloy. 3. Beckett, Samuel,
1906- Malone meurt. 4. Beckett, Samuel, 1906-
Innommable. I. Title.
PQ2603.E378Z89 1990 843'.914—dc20 90-8557
ISBN 0-691-06789-9 (acid-free paper)
Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the
Paul Mellon Fund of Princeton University Press
This book has been composed in Linotron Baskerville
Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper
and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the
Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the
Council on Library Resources
Printed in the United States of America by Princeton University Press,
Princeton, New Jersey
3 5 79 10 8 6 42
For Susan
and for my parents

CONTENTS
Preface ix
INTRODUCTION
The Breach 3
CHAPTER ONE
Dispossession 34
CHAPTER TWO
Impersonality 66
CHAPTER THREE
Error 122
CONCLUSION
The Ends of Literature 160
Index 171

PREFACE
THE READING presented here focuses almost exclusively on
Samuel Beckett's trilogy of novels and on the conception
of subjectivity articulated therein. Its purpose is twofold:
on the one hand, to place Beckett within a configuration
of thinkers whose understanding of subjectivity remains
incompatible with the totalizing claims of phenomenology,
and on the other, to challenge in so doing the assumptions
underlying virtually the entire corpus of Beckett criticism.
Regarding this second objective, it is not my intention to
conduct a sustained polemic against any particular critic or
group of critics but rather, through a critique of its foun
dation, to place in question the ideology that grew out of
phenomenology in the forties and fifties and has since per
vaded the interpretation of Beckett's work. I refer of
course to existential humanism. There may well be no
writer of this century who has more radically questioned
the foundations of humanism than Samuel Beckett—and
no writer who has spawned a corporation of critics more
determined to ignore the consequences of that question
ing. This determination frequently surfaces as the pro
fessed belief that, in the end, Beckett restores human dig
nity through his humor—as though the tenor of that
humor were self-evident and not in the least subversive.
Or else it is claimed, no less frequendy and unreflectively,
that the ultimate horizon of a text supposedly centered on
the despair of the human condition remains the redemp
tive value of art itself. At any rate, the various ways in
which Beckett's fundamentally critical work has been re
cuperated all rely on an unexamined notion of the human
subject. Indeed, this is why most of the criticism devoted
to his work amounts to an exercise in ideology rather than
in genuine reflection; and this is why one can only begin