Samuel Beckett's Essayistic Approach to Nothing

Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2014 “Gathering Thinglessness”: Samuel Beckett’s Essayistic Approach To Nothing Dena Marks Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Marks, Dena, "“Gathering Thinglessness”: Samuel Beckett’s Essayistic Approach To Nothing" (2014). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 599. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/599 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. “GATHERING THINGLESSNESS”: SAMUEL BECKETT’S ESSAYISTIC APPROACH TO NOTHING A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by Dena Ratner Marks B.A., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2006 M.A. New School for Social Research, 2010 December 2014 For Ari and T-Lo ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My interest in Samuel Beckett’s contributions to the philosophy of nothing was first ignited in a course “On Nothing” taught by Anthony Gottlieb at The New School for Social Research. Pairing philosophy and literature, Professor Gottlieb asked us to discuss the ways in which Beckett contributed to intellectual history on the concept of nothing. While it was fairly manageable to summarize the views of the philosophers who predated him, when it came time to discuss Beckett’s own views on nothing, I found myself paralyzed. It was not so much that Beckett appeared to contribute to a philosophical debate on the matter, what seemed most original about his work was his formal play with the word “nothing.” From that course forward, I decided to dedicate my graduate work to exploring the conundrum of the relationship between philosophy and literature in Beckett’s work. For sparking my interest in this topic, I sincerely thank Professor Gottlieb. At Louisiana State University, I received further support in exploring this topic through a course with Dr. Joseph Kronick on the relationship between ethics and literature. Dr. Kronick not only gave me invaluable reading lists and helpful comments on my papers, he also spent countless hours discussing the topic with me. I thank him enormously for all of his feedback and encouragement in the process of formulating my topic and writing my dissertation. I also thank Dr. William Demastes for serving as the chair of my committee, for lending me books, for all of his positive reinforcement throughout the process, and for his challenging questions that pushed me to think more deeply about my arguments. I am sincerely grateful that he has supported my project. Dr. John Protevi’s contributions to the committee have also been much appreciated. From his initial agreement to serve on the committee, even though he didn’t know me, and his detailed iii attention to every word in my proposal, his feedback has helped me to define my terms more precisely. For personal support, I thank my parents who encouraged me to complete the dissertation even when the research and writing process grew tiresome. I am also deeply grateful to my spouse, Ari Marks, who sacrificed our time together to allow me to complete the dissertation. He also patiently listened to me while I tried to verbalize this abstruse topic. When I began to feel like everyone in the world wrote about Beckett and nothing, it was a comfort to learn that, at least he was generous enough to say, this topic was still somewhat interesting. iv PREFACE What is Beckett’s relationship to philosophy? This question has long dominated the critical discussion on Beckett’s work from early existentialist and Cartesian critiques to the current trend to figure Beckett as a post-structuralist. The dominant answer to this question has been offered in a mode of identification: Beckett’s writing aligns with this philosopher or that philosophical movement. The current drive toward interdisciplinarity lends itself to the idea that the barriers between the fields ought to be dismantled, yet this sense of “oughtness” fails to investigate whether the border between the fields can indeed be transgressed. That is why the purpose of my dissertation is to trouble a neat identification that often appears in the scholarship on Samuel Beckett, which suggests his writing represents a literary manifestation of philosophy, one that disrupts the longstanding separation of the two fields. Instead, I highlight the difficulty of assimilating Beckett’s writing with philosophy by arguing that he maintains a circuitous relationship to philosophy that does not resolve itself into identification with one movement even while his essayistic style approximates experimental philosophical prose. I arrive at this conclusion by first responding to the dominant strand in Beckett criticism that figures him as a philosopher whether of “existentialist,” “deconstructionist,” or Cartesian traditions. While such analyses are designed to undermine the “ancient quarrel” between literature and philosophy, in the first chapter, I argue that they actually serve to re-subordinate literature to philosophy since they depend on the preexisting philosophical text to explain the literary one. I thereby select a comparative approach as a way of exploring areas of intersection as well as disparity, which prevent the fields from being identified with each other. In chapter two, I provide a theoretical basis for highlighting the difficulty of assimilating philosophy with literature. To do so, I review twentieth-century theory on the ancient quarrel v between literature and philosophy—turning to Derrida, Blanchot, Kristeva, and Levinas—to demonstrate that the figures who are often employed to support the disintegration of the disciplines actually express hesitations at such a vision of sameness. As I discuss, many of these thinkers affirm Plato’s original characterization of literature as a field that remains philosophy’s other since it depends on rhythm rather than a rigorous, logical methodology (Levinas and Kristeva); raises questions of ethics since it does not necessarily advocate for a moral perspective (Levinas and Blanchot); and unlike philosophy, does not argue systematically for a particular thesis (Blanchot). Furthermore, Beckett’s separation of literature and philosophy, circuitously, places him in a Platonic camp. Since the question of the relationship between literature and philosophy is such a broad one, I then take a turn to examine one philosophical and aesthetic concept, “nothing,” that has long dominated discussions of Beckett’s work to understand where Beckett’s use of the term fits on a continuum between the two fields. In chapter three, I argue that, contrary to a longstanding tradition in Beckett studies, exemplified by Lance Butler and Michael Bennett who posit that Beckett promulgates a consistent position that the nature of being is nothing, Beckett actually incorporates multiple, inconsistent philosophical positions on “nothing” into his work. For instance, his work both suggests that nothingness is impossible and that nothingness is an attainable goal as well as indicates that language proffers no meaning and that communication through language is inevitable. Instead of consequently arguing that Beckett’s preference for multiplicity indicates that he is a post-structuralist, I contend that his enduring uncertainty remains distinct from deconstruction’s systematic exploration of tenable possibilities. In chapter four, I turn to Beckett’s aesthetic sources to argue that his primary contribution to intellectual history was not to make an original argument about nothing, but to alter the formal vi properties that are conventionally associated with the word. For instance, while his predecessor Joyce often used the term “abyss” or “void” at moments of recognition and reversal, Beckett uses the word “nothing” repeatedly and continuously, indexing his turn away from narrative arcs. Similarly, while Baudelaire uses the word “abîme” to convey a sense of the terror and bliss of the sublime, Beckett’s abstract and empty “nothing” takes a turn toward the philosophical in the way it moves from the natural and toward the conceptual. After all, while the “abyss” has a physical referent in the oceanic deep, “nothing” is a pure concept in the sense that it has, by definition, no physical presence in the universe. Yet Beckett may have adopted such philosophical language not to contribute to intellectual history, but to surpass his literary predecessor’s negative aesthetics. In the fifth chapter, I return to the question of the relationship between philosophy and literature in Beckett works, but this time with the goal of investigating a formal area of overlap between the two fields, the essay. While acknowledging that such a comparison on the basis of style remains incomplete, I conclude that Beckett’s aggregation of inconsistent philosophical sources, his preference for abstraction, and his preference for a fragmented sentence structure mirrors the form of the Montaignian essay in the sense that it reflects the movements of an ever- shifting mind instead of a unified

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