Beckettian Irony in the Work of Paul Auster, John Banville and J.M
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
‘Permanent Parabasis’: Beckettian Irony in the Work of Paul Auster, John Banville and J.M. Coetzee Michael Springer Doctor of Philosophy University of York Department of English and Related Literature April 2014 iii Abstract This thesis considers the influence of the writing of Samuel Beckett on that of Paul Auster, John Banville and J.M. Coetzee through the lens of Romantic irony, as formulated by Friedrich Schlegel and, later, Paul de Man. The broad argument is that the form of irony first articulated by the Jena Romantics is brought in Beckett’s work to something of an extreme, and that this extremity represents both one of his most characteristic achievements and a unique and specifically troublesome challenge for those who come after him. The thesis hence explores how Auster, Banville and Coetzee respond to and negotiate this irony in their own work, and contrasts their respective responses. Put briefly, I find that all three writers to one extent or another deflect Beckett’s irony, while engaging with it: Auster adopts certain stylistic and structural aspects of Beckett’s work, but on the whole reaches fundamentally different epistemological and existential conclusions; Banville engages closely with the epistemological and existential challenge posed by Beckett’s irony, and attempts to balance this with a contrasting sense of the capacity of art and the imagination to make meaning of the world; and Coetzee, after an initial attempt at stylistic imitation, moves away from this but remains fundamentally influenced by certain insights into subjectivity and ethical relation he derives from Beckett’s work. Of Auster’s work, I consider most closely ‘White Spaces’ and The New York Trilogy, arguing that the former represents a transitional development toward the tone, perspective and voice of the latter; of Banville’s, Doctor Copernicus and Eclipse, contrasting the former’s confidence in human capacities for knowledge of the world and the self with the latter’s more Beckettian skepticism and disenchantment; and of Coetzee’s, In the Heart of the Country with Waiting for the Barbarians, showing how the latter abandons the former’s marked Beckettian stylistic traces while continuing to evidence the influence of Beckett’s work in the depiction of matters such as subjectivity, language and interpersonal relation. By way of conclusion, I consider how such later writing might reshape or alter our understanding of Beckett’s work, and propose directions for further research into the place of Romantic irony in Modern and contemporary fiction. iv Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................ iii Acknowledgments............................................................................................................ vi Declaration of Originality ............................................................................................... vii Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 1 Chapter I: Beckett’s Irony ................................................................................................ 15 ‘if indeed one can be “successor” to a crisis’: a model of influence ............................ 15 ‘the rapture of vertigo’: irony and its others ................................................................ 22 ‘something gone wrong with the silence’: irony in Beckett......................................... 35 ‘as for myself, that unfailing pastime’: the irony of subjectivity ................................. 44 Chapter II: Influence and Testament................................................................................ 51 ‘the morality of a good sentence’: Paul Auster ............................................................ 51 ‘our only duty – inexplicable and futile of attainment’: J.M. Coetzee ......................... 54 ‘not progress, optimism or delusions, but words alone’: John Banville ...................... 59 ‘style makes the man’ ................................................................................................... 67 Chapter III: Paul Auster ................................................................................................... 84 ‘standing watch in this interval of silence’: Beckett and Auster .................................. 84 ‘between things and the names of things’: Auster’s irony ........................................... 91 ‘wordless things and thingless words’: language, selfhood and the il y a ................... 99 Chapter IV: J.M. Coetzee ............................................................................................... 110 ‘a crumbling, a frenzied collapsing’: Beckett and Coetzee ........................................ 110 ‘so obscure as to be a prodigy’: language and the other ............................................ 117 ‘of no interest in itself, like all that has a moral’: allegory, irony, alterity................. 125 Chapter V: John Banville ............................................................................................... 137 ‘I am like everything but myself’: ironic rapture ....................................................... 137 ‘the definition of redness’: the limits of simile .......................................................... 144 ‘intricate evasions of as’: the inostensible self ........................................................... 163 Conclusion: Back to Beckett .......................................................................................... 175 Abbreviated References ................................................................................................. 186 Bibliography .................................................................................................................. 188 v vi Acknowledgments It is a great pleasure to acknowledge the assistance of the people and organizations involved in the production of this study: Prof. Derek Attridge, my supervisor, provided detailed and insightful criticism and guidance throughout the writing of this thesis. It has been a pleasure and a privilege to work with him. Prof. Hugh Haughton contributed invaluable advice on early drafts of these chapters. The Department of English and Related Literature and the Humanities Research Centre at the University of York have been as stimulating and collegial research communities as one could possibly ask for. My time here has been greatly enriched by fellow post-graduates and scholars too numerous to mention individually. Arthur Rose’s editing clarified my ideas and made the final product a far stronger work. The many conversations we have had on the material considered here, and related matters, have challenged and stimulated my own enquiry. The Department of English and Related Literature and the Oppenheimer Memorial Trust provided financial support without which this study could not have been conducted. I would not have been able to begin this course of study without the help of my mother, Dodie. Her support and encouragement have helped me through many difficult times, and I owe anything I may have achieved in large part to her. Her expert proofreading also improved the writing a great deal. Finally, thanks to my wife Molly for her patience and support throughout the writing of this thesis. Conversations with her almost always opened my eyes to new perspectives on and insights into the novels considered in this study, and her three-cup chicken provided nourishment both physical and spiritual. This thesis is dedicated to her, with love and gratitude. vii Declaration of Originality I hereby confirm that this work is my own, is original, and has not previously been submitted for examination at this or any other institution or published elsewhere. 1 Introduction In this thesis, I trace the influence of the writing of Samuel Beckett on that of three writers of the generation following his, Paul Auster, John Banville and J.M. Coetzee, through an analysis of the way in which the later writers adopt, adapt, negotiate, deflect and develop the irony I consider characteristic of Beckett’s work. This irony is framed primarily in the terms first proposed by Friedrich Schlegel and later rearticulated by Paul de Man.1 I take this aspect of Beckett’s work to represent something of a high- water mark of a movement initiated (if not solely at the very least in significant part) by Schlegel and the Jena Romantics, and one that has informed Western conceptions of and attitudes to art and aesthetic discourse since that time. The ways in which this irony is negotiated in the work of these later writers can hence be read as demonstrating a continuity in the contemporary era of important aspects of Romantic literary and aesthetic praxis and theory, and thus provides a reliable and perspicuous barometer of its relevance to our current culture of letters – for good and ill: the fact that all the writers considered in this study are white, heterosexual men may be taken to indicate a certain narrowness in the scope of these concerns. There are obviously other aspects to Beckett’s legacy, and other ways of understanding it – as performances of Waiting for Godot in war-torn Sarajevo and hurricane-devastated New Orleans attest. Nevertheless, it does seem to me that the aspect of the writing that I focus on is among the most idiosyncratic and typical, and hence among those that most clearly define Beckett’s achievement. My