Samuel Beckett and Fyodor Dostoevsky

Metaphysical Comedy: Samuel Beckett and Fyodor Dostoevsky PhD English Literature Ekaterina Gosteva May 2019 I confirm that this is my own work and the use of all material from other sources has been properly and fully acknowledged. ABSTRACT This thesis investigates the connection between Beckett’s comedy and Dostoevsky’s novels in the light of René Girard’s theory of metaphysical desire. While focusing on Beckett’s prose of the 1930s, this study begins with the typology of laughter in Watt. With the help of this passage (employed as a critical tool), the subject of Beckett’s comedy is preliminarily defined as ‘The Unhappy Consciousness’. In Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, this term is stated with regards to the functions of laughter as a negative response to a threat from a hostile phenomenal world. ‘The risus purus’, which Beckett celebrates as ‘the laugh of laughs’, reveals itself as a satirical attack at Kant’s rational cosmology and Hegel’s phenomenology. A further investigation into this structure provides a link between the genre of comedy in general, Beckett’s comic form and Girard’s theory of mimetic desire, based on the works of Cervantes, Flaubert, Stendhal, Proust and Dostoevsky. The works of these novelists allowed René Girard to articulate a concrete theorization of desire, which binds together literary and anthropological questions. Beckett’s engagement with Dostoevsky remains a blind spot in Beckett studies. Although as early as Proust, Beckett attempted to link Proust and Dostoevsky as the writers whose technique he defined as ‘negative and comic’, the scarcity of his critical comments on Dostoevsky has been an obstacle for scholars trying to identify and analyse their relationship. This study hopes to reveal that Beckett’s enthusiastic comments on the Russian novelist are only the tip of the iceberg whose bigger part is hidden in the deeper waters of Beckett’s fiction. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost I would like to thank Dr Mark Nixon whose very perceptive comments and helpful advice has informed the present study. He has really been a great supervisor in all respects. I would also like to thank Barry Mulligan for the encouragement and comments he provided during my research. Last but not least my special thanks to my dear friend, Simon Geoghegan, whose indomitable patience and superlative yet self-deprecating assistance in editing my work has never failed me. Table of Contents INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………….. 1 CHAPTER 1: Methodology…………………………………………………... 20 Section 1 Beckett and Kant………………………………………………….... 21 Section 2 Hegel………………………………………………………………... 30 Section 3 From Old to New Comedy…………………………………………. 33 Section 4 The Realistic Novel……………………………………………….... 36 CHAPTER 2: Nihilism………………………………………………............... 45 Section 1 Ressentiment………………………………………………............... 46 Section 2 Dostoevsky in France………………………………………………. 55 Section 3 Doppelgänger……………………………………………….............. 69 CHAPTER 3: Beckett and his ‘Models’………………………………………. 82 Section 1 James Joyce………………………………………………................ 82 Section 2 Proust, Dante and Vico……………………………………………... 87 Section 3 An Ineluctable Romantic Movement……………………………….. 98 Section 4 Kicks………………………………………………........................... 111 CHAPTER 4: Beckett Learning Comedy……………………………………... 130 Section 1 Bergson………………………………………………....................... 132 Section 2 Hats and Doubles in Beckett’s Novels……………………………... 145 Section 3 Dante and Dostoevsky’s Hell………………………………………. 149 Section 4 Murphy…………………………………………………………….... 166 CHAPTER 5: Watt and History……………………………………………….. 186 Section 1 History is literature/Literature is history…………………………… 186 Section 2 The War and Watt’s Genre……………………….…………………. 195 Section 3 Philosophy………………………………………………………….. 200 Section 4 Master and Servants……………………………………………….... 209 Section 5 Religion…………………………………………………………….. 213 CONCLUSION……………………………………………………………….. 223 1 INTRODUCTION The idea that the novels of Beckett and Dostoevsky can be read in parallel as metaphysical comedies emerged out of a genre study of Beckett’s early prose, undertaken initially with a view to translating Murphy into Russian. Murphy embodies the problem common to all of Beckett’s novels that Ruby Cohn has highlighted so concisely: ‘Murphy is hardly a clear book, but it is clearly comic in its details’.1 Elsewhere in her seminal Comic Gamut, she complains that ‘so ambiguous are Beckett’s comic heroes that we scarcely know why we laugh’.2 There are many who would argue that Beckett’s creation is not comic, but even these readers admit that the significance of the philosophical allusions, constituting the content of his works, remains ‘opaque’. According to Matthew Feldman, the author of Falsifying Beckett, ‘the very opacity of Beckett’s work […] is a key part of its universal relevance and force’.3 In his ‘Introduction’ to Beckett/Philosophy, he expresses a degree of scepticism with regards to a previous critical approach advocated by Dermot Moran, who wrote in 2006 that a ‘stark Beckettian world cries out for philosophical interpretation’.4 Cohn’s insistence on the clarity of Beckett’s comic details calls to mind Chris Ackerley’s Demented Particulars, which is the best annotation of Beckett’s philosophical allusions in Murphy. Despite the fact that the book enriches our knowledge of Beckett’s readings in philosophy, it hardly accounts for their ‘concretion’ in a form that affects us aesthetically. From Beckett’s critical writings we know that he was committed to the art that ‘makes no attempt to dissociate content from form. The one is the concretion of the other, the revelation of a world’.5 Since Beckett’s early writings are especially notable for their rich vein of comedy, it is perhaps possible to suggest that the critic who wishes to understand his comic form must look for a philosophical meaning that is essentially comic. In trying to bind together comedy and philosophy in Beckett’s early writings, the methodology advocated across this study leans on the theory of mimetic or metaphysical desire proposed by the French American critic René Girard. According to Girard, mimetic desire is a puzzling phenomenon which can only be discovered in the context of literary 1 Ruby Cohn, Samuel Beckett: the Comic Gamut (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1962), p. 46. 2 Ibid., p. 8. 3 Matthew Feldman, Falsifying Beckett: Essays on Archives, Philosophy, and Methodology in Beckett Studies (Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag, 2015), p. 19. 4 Dermot Moran, ‘Beckett and Philosophy’, in Samuel Beckett: 100 Years (Dublin: New Island, 2006), quoted in Matthew Feldman’s ‘Introduction’ to Beckett/Philosophy (Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag, 2015), p. 12. 5 Samuel Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues With George Duthuit (London: John Calder, 1999), p. 88. 2 texts. He speaks of ‘one essential human behaviour’ – namely, desire, whose imitative nature has been largely misunderstood. Plato’s notion of mimesis, known to us through Aristotle’s Poetics, states that ‘man is the most imitative of creatures’ and ‘learns his earliest lessons by imitation’.6 Whereas Aristotle refers to men’s propensity to represent (imitate) objects, Girard insists that humans imitate desires of one another in choosing their objects. Given that mimetic behaviour is essential, or almost unconscious, this condition is ideal for comedy. As Chapter 4 will reveal, Beckett was acquainted with Henri Bergson’s concept of comedy (in Le Rire) as the genre that feeds on the individuals who are perennially ‘absentminded’. It is, perhaps, no mere coincidence that both Bergson and Girard have singled out Don Quixote as a classical example of the over-romantic mind – a comic character who ‘falls’ because he is ‘intent upon a star’.7 Both see this situation as a comic archetype, but their accounts of the hero’s tragic unconscious are very different. For Bergson, Don Quixote is ‘the stubborn spirit [that] ends by adjusting things to its own way’ (91). In Girard’s opinion, Bergson himself is a romantic reader because he overlooks the role played by Amadis of Gaul – a legendary model whose chivalric life-style Don Quixote wishes to imitate. For a philosophically minded critic like Girard, this form of representation subverts the whole Enlightenment project with its insistence on the mind’s ‘divine autonomy’. By Girard’s own admission, the shift in his thinking as a philosopher and historian towards far broader social and cultural questions occurred when he was assigned to a teaching post on French literature at Indiana. The need to read all the novelists opened his eyes to their ‘intuitive and concrete understanding of the human condition’ which he called mimetic desire.8 Once the reality of the divine model or mediator is acknowledged, the traditional cleavage between the Enlightenment (reason) and Romanticism (imagination) is removed. The romantic myth of divine autonomy is at the core of Girard’s earliest monographs on mimetic desire, Deceit, Desire and the Novel, in original Mensonge romantique et vérité Romanesque (1961) and Resurrection from the Underground, first published as Dostoevski: du double à l’unité (1963). In both of them, he traces this development from Don Quixote’s desire for the ‘divine Amadis’ to Kirillov’s desire for self-annihilation. Although upon this journey, Girard speaks more about tragedy 6 Aristotle, Poetics in Classical Literary Criticism: Aristotle, Horace, Longinus (London: Penguin, 1977), p. 35. 7 Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (New York: Dover Publications,

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