Table Of ContentSAMUEL BECKETT'S EARLY FICTION AND DRAMA:
A STUDY OF ARTISTIC THEORY AND PRACTICE
A thesis
submitted in partial fulfilment
of the requirements for the Degree
of
Doctor of Philosophy in English Literature
in the
University of Canterbury
by
James Acheson
University of Canterbury
1988
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
ABSTRACT i
ACKNOIYLEDGEMENTS iii
COPYRIGHT DECLARATION v
l. THEORY AND PRACTICE: BECKETT, JOYCE AND PROUST 1
2. "ASSUHPTION" AND DREAM -OF -FA-IR -TO l'fIDDLING WOIvIEN 29
3. MORE PRICKS THAN KICKS AS COMIC EPIC 51
4. MURPHY'S l'IETAPHYSICS 92
5. HATT AND THE GENTLE SKIHMER 121
6. THE TRANSITION TO FRENCH 161
7. THE ART OF FAILURE: MOLLOY, !VlALONE DIES, THE UN NAMABLE 189
8. FIRST PLAYS FOR THE STAGE 255
9. PLAYS FOR RADIO 305
10. STAGE AND SCREEN 347
11. THE SHAPE OF IDEAS 393
12. RECENT PLAYS FOR THE STAGE 436
13. BEGINNING TO END 466
APPENDIX 1: THE LADDER JOKE IN I'JATT 470
APPENDIX 2: BECKETT'S LATE TELEVISION PLAYS 473
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 478
B
i
ABSTRACT
Though Beckett is best known for \oJaiting for Godot, his first
published work was not a play but a critical essay. That essay,
"Dante • • • Bruno • Vico • • Joyce" (1929), a defence of Joyce's
"\vork in Progress," was the first of a number of occasional essays
and reviews he was to write over the next quarter century. Beckett's
main ambition during this period was to establish himself as a
creative writer; he did not set out to develop a literary aesthetic.
Nevertheless, there emerges from these occasional pieces a consistent
theory about the relationship between art and the limits of human
knowledge, a theory he puts into practice in his early fiction and
drama.
What Beckett argues in the essays, in essence, is that absolute
knowledge lies beyond human reach, and that art must reflect this.
If the human artist were possessed of the omniscience and omnipotence
of God, he would be able not only to mirror in art the infinite
complexity of the world at large, but to devise a succession of works
independent of anything previously created. It is because the
artist's knowledge and power are limited that he is able only to hint
at the world's complexity in works that derive, inevitably, from
earlier art.
Thus, in his first (as yet unpublished) novel, "Dream of Fair to
Middling Women," Beckett uses Chaucer's The Legend of Good Women,
Tennyson's "A Dream of Fair Homen," and Henry Hilliamson's The Dream
of Fair Women: Tale of Youth After the Great \var as points of
~
ii
departure for the creation of an original novel concerned with the
impossibility of making sense of the complexity of life. Similarly,
in the novel that follo\vs it, More Pricks Than Kicks. he draws on the
comic epic form pioneered by Fielding to present us with a modern
innovation: a comic epic of relativism designed to demonstrate that
absolute knowledge is unattainable. Subsequently, in Murphy, Hatt,
the Nouvelles and and Camier, Beckett makes it clear that
~1ercier
there can be no definitive answers to either metaphysical or
epistemological questions; while in his trilogy of novels, Molloy,
Malone Dies and The Unnamable, he demonstrates that it is impossible
to knOiv anything with absolute certainty about the human mind.
Between Malone Dies and The Unnamable, Beckett wrote his first
major play, Haiting for Godot, which focuses, like the novels that
precede and the stage plays that follow it, on the relationship
between art and the limits of human knowledge. As we read the novels
in the order in which Beckett wrote them, we become aware of his
increasing sophistication in respect of artistic form. This is also
the case when we read the plays, and what is especially interesting
about them is his experimentation with what can be done not only on
stage, but on radio, television and film, to demonstrate the
implications of the fact that human knowledge is limited.
iii
ACKNOhlLEDGEI1ENTS
I am very grateful to my two Associate Supervisors, Dr. Howard
McNaughton of the Canterbury English Department and Dr. Peter
Tremewan of the French Department, for their thoughtful readings of a
draft of this thesis. I am also grateful to my English Department
colleague Dr. Gordon Spence for his comments on Chapters One, Two,
Three and Eleven. Finally, I wish to thank my wife Carole, who read
the thesis from beginning to end and made many helpful suggestions.
Parts of this thesis have been published, or are soon to be
published in article form. Part of Chapter One has appeared as
"Beckett, Proust, and Schopenhauer," Contemporary Literature, 19
(Spring 1978), 165-79. Parts of Chapters Two, Four, Six and Eight
are included in "Samuel Beckett and the Heresy of Love," forthcoming
in Beckett's Portraits of 'vomen: the Function of Gender in the
Novels and Plays, ed. Linda Ben-Zvi (Urbana/Chicago: University of
Illinois Press). Chapter Four has been published as "Murphy's
Metaphysics," Journal of Beckett Studies,S (Autumn 1979), 9-23.
Part of Chapter Seven has appeared as "The Art of Failure: Samuel
Beckett's Molloy," Southern Humanities Review, 17 (hlinter 1983), 1-
18. Part of Chapter Eight has been published as "Chess with the
Audience: Samuel Beckett's Endgame," Critical Ouarterly, 22 (Summer
1980), 33-45; rpt. in Critical Essays on Samuel Beckett, ed. Patrick
McCarthy (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1986), pp. 181-92. Part of Chapter
Nine is forthcoming as "Beckett Re-Joycing: hlords and Music," in
Joyce and Beckett: a Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Phyllis
Carey and Edwin Jewinski. Part of Chapter Ten is to be published in
the Journal of Beckett Studies, 13 [1988] as "Beckett's Film,
iv
Berkeley, and Schopenhauer." Chapter Eleven has been published as
two articles: "Hadness and Nysticism in Beckett's Not I," AffivILA. 55
(Nay 1981), 91-101, and "The Shape of Ideas: That Time and
Footfalls," in Beckett's Later Fiction and Drama: Texts for Company.
ed. James Acheson and Kateryna Arthur (London: Nacmillan/ New York:
St. Martin's Press, 1987), pp. 115-35. Appendix One is forthcoming
as "A Note on the Ladder Joke in \va tt, " Journal of Beckett Studies,
13 [1988].
Chapters One, Four, Five and Seven of the present thesis have
been reworked from Chapters One, Two, Three and Four, respectively,
of my 1974 University of Keele M.A. thesis. The remaining chapters
are wholly unrelated to the earlier thesis.
v
COPYRIGHT DECLARATION
All rights reserved. No reproduction. copy or transmission of
this thesis may be made without written permission from its author,
James Acheson. No part of this thesis may be reproduced, copied or
l
transmitted save with written permission. Any person who does any
unauthorised act in relation to this thesis may be liable to criminal
prosecution and civil claims for damages.
1
CHAPTER ONE
THEORY AND PRACTICE: BECKETT, JOYCE, AND PROUST
1
Though Beckett is best known for Waiting for Godot, he began his
career as a writer not with a play but a critical essay. That essay,
"Dante ••• Bruno • Vico •• Joyce" (1929), a defence of Joyce's
"Work in Progress," was the first of a number of occasional essays
and reviews he was to write over the next quarter century.1
Beckett's main ambition during this period was to establish himself
as a novelist and poet, not as a literary theorist or journalist: he
wrote his essay on "Work in Progress" at Joyce's request, and an
essay on Proust a year later for the sake of advancing what turned
out to be an abortive academic career. He agreed to write· the other
essays and reviews either to publicise the work of friends or to
supplement a meagre income; he did not set out to develop a literary
aesthetic. Nevertheless, there emerges from these occasional pieces
a consistent theory about the relationship between art and the limits
of human knowledge, a theory he puts into practice in his early
fiction and drama.
Beckett's earliest essays, on Joyce and Proust, are of special
interest in that they reveal what he thought, as an aspiring young
writer, of two of this century's greatest novelists. Beckett first
met Joyce in Paris in the autumn of 1928. about a year after
graduating from Trinity College, Dublin with a degree in modern
2
2
languages. "Work in Progress" (later Finnegans Wake) had been
appearing serially in little magazines for some years by then, and
Joyce had decided to bring out a collection of essays in answer to
3
some of the negative criticisms that had been made of it. Impressed
with Beckett's knowledge of Dante, Joyce asked him to contribute an
essay on the role played in "Work in Progress" by Dante, Bruno and
Vico. Beckett had studied Dante at Trinity, but was not familiar
with the other two writers, and therefore began by reading their work
and discussing it with Joyce. From their conversations it emerged
that Joyce wanted him to demonstrate that "Work in Progress" owed a
great deal to the three Italians, but was nonetheless a highly
4
original work of art. The actual writing of the essay was, however,
left to Beckett. and it was probably his own decision to consider
Joyce's originality with reference to the larger question of the
relationship between artistic form and the limits of human knowledge.
As "Dante ••• Bruno. Vico •• Joyce" makes clear. Beckett
finds in Joyce an author preoccupied with the question of whether
there are any underlying principles of order in the world at large.
"Work in Progress" draws attention to the existence of various
numerical coincidences--to the fact that there are, for example,
"four legs to a table, and four to a horse, and four seasons and four
Gospels and four Provinces in Ireland, ••• twelve Tables of the
Law, and twelve Apostles and twelve months and twelve Napoleonic
marshals and twelve men in Florence called Ottolenghi"--because Joyce
is "conscious that things with a common numerical characteristic tend
towards a very significant interrelationship" CL, p. 32). If the
significance of the interrelationship of things with a common
numerical characteristic were to be taken seriously. and could be
3
established with absolute certainty, we might find that the world is
governed by some sort of ordering principle. But two insuperable
problems stand in the way of discovering that principle--problems to
which Beckett ·refers only obliquely. "[Joyce] cannot tell you," he
says, addressing the reader, "[why numerical coincidences exist]
because he is not God Almighty, but in a thousand years he will tell
you, and in the meantime must be content to know why horses have not
five legs nor three" (J, p. 32).
Though the question of the interrelationship of numbers is no
more than tangentially philosophical, the problems it gives rise to
are in essence the same ones a philosopher would face in trying to
form an accurate picture of the world at large. In order to
formulate an absolutely certain account of the significance of
universal numerical coincidence, it would be necessary to begin by
compiling a list of all the coincidences of all the numbers in the
number system. A theory put forward to explain a list of, say, a
hundred coincidences of the number four might be valid for that list,
but it would not necessarily be valid for all the other coincidences
of the number four, and it would go only a small way towards
accounting for all the coincidences of all the numbers there are.
But compiling a list of all the coincidences there are is beyond
human capability, for the list would extend to infinite length and
would take an eternity to complete. Only an omniscient God would be
equal to the task.
This is the first problem. The second is that, even if the list
were compiled, another task would remain which could only be
performed by God: that of making sense of an infinite quantity of
data. When Beckett claims that Joyce could solve both problems given
