“Of Being – Or Remaining”: Beckett And... Early Greek Philosophy

“OF BEING – OR REMAINING”: BECKETT AND... 67 “Of being – or remaining”: Beckett and... Early Greek Philosophy Peter Fifield (St. John’s College, University of Oxford, UK) This article argues that Beckett’s interests in early Greek philosophy stretch from the well-known debt to Democritus to idiosyncratic and previously unacknowledged uses. Surveying existing scholarship, this article examines Beckett’s “Philosophy Notes” in order to observe his note-taking habits, and how they manifest themselves in his use of Thales in “Serena I”, Hippokrates in The Unnamable, and Parmenides in Krapp’s Last Tape. Uncovering the previously unknown source for Beckett’s reading on Zeno, it argues that the commonplace reference to the “pre-Socratics” in Beckett studies ought to be altered to coincide with Beckett’s notes and sources, which consistently prefer “early Greek” philosophy. Finally, the article examines an Anaximandrean sense of cosmological justice, drawn from Beckett’s notes, to place the sufferings of his characters within a Greek, rather than Judeo-Christian or Schopenhaurean sense of affliction. The contours of Beckett’s substantial debt to early Greek philosophy have been emerging with increasing detail for over forty years, not least spurred on by the reluctant benediction of the author himself. Offering direction to Lawrence E. Harvey in 1962, he proposed that “if he were a critic setting out to write on the works of Beckett (and he thanked heaven he was not), he would start with two quotations, one by Geulincx: ‘Ubi nihil vales ibi nihil velis,’ and one by Democritus: ‘Nothing is more real than nothing.’”1 He gave the same response to the enquiry of Sighle Kennedy in 1967, noting that the quotations were “both already in Murphy and neither 1 Lawrence E. Harvey, Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni- versity Press, 1970), 267-68. 68 SOFIA PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW very rational.”2 This has given to both Geulincx and Democritus a critical standing unlike any other figures in the field, including interpretive main- stays such as Schopenhauer, Johnson and Descartes; not only allowing scholars to work from a rich body of documentation, but to follow something like an authorial preference. The expansion of the so-called “grey canon” has encouraged an empirical reawakening in the study of Beckett. His relationship to Greek philosophy from the seventh to the fourth century BC is central to this. The availability of the extensive “Philosophy Notes” (TCD MS10967) in particular has issued an invitation to weigh-up existing scholarship afresh, as well as to move in new directions.3 If many readings in the area have torn their insights from the jaws of an influential Cartesian view of Beckett, fu- ture readings will, I suggest, increasingly depart from the ongoing critical preference for Murphy and Democritus, to consider the relations of other works and thinkers. This article thus aims to demonstrate that the still un- folding richness of the empirical resources encourages both a richer empirical and thematic digestion of Beckett’s works. Examination of this material reveals the nature of Beckett’s engagement with early Greek philosophy as a varied and sizeable body of thinkers and texts rather than a handful of prominent figures or conceptual highlights. This essay reviews existing scholarship before considering Beckett’s note-taking and a newly identified source. It then broaches an assortment of correspondences less frequently explored between Beckett’s work and philosophers including Thales, Hip- pokrates, Parmenides and Anaximander, before considering briefly the life of the early Greeks in contemporary intellectual culture. Traces of these philosophers can be found in the three main sets of manuscript notes from the 1930s, and indicate the depth and persistence of Beckett’s interest in the area. Notes on Robert Burton’s “Democritus to the 2 Samuel Beckett, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, edited by Ruby Cohn (London: Calder, 1983), 113. 3 Although all references are given to the manuscript numbers at Trinity College Dublin, all citations of Beckett’s “Philosophy Notes” go by way of the appendix to Matthew Feldman, “Sourcing Aporetics”: An Empirical Approach to the Philosophical Development of Samuel Beckett's Writings. Unpublished PhD., Oxford Brookes University, 2004. “OF BEING – OR REMAINING”: BECKETT AND... 69 Reader,” from The Anatomy of Melancholy, which Beckett read in its en- tirety, can be found in the “Dream Notebook,” notes that John Pilling dates to September 1931.4 References derived from this source can be found in Dream of Fair to Middling Women, More Pricks than Kicks and beyond. Appearing amidst the various subjects covered in the polyglot “Whoroscope Notebook” (RUL MS 3000) are entries on Pythagoras, Hippasus of Croton and other Greek philosophers, which were used in the composition of Murphy, as well as further quotations from Burton. Evidence of a more systematic reading program can be found in the “Interwar Notes,” covering more than five hundred sides, two hundred and sixty-seven of which treat of ancient philosophy, and have become known as the “Philosophy Notes.”5 These were most likely composed between mid- 1932 and mid-1934, and provide the most substantial body of notes on early Greek philosophy in the “grey canon.” They are drawn principally from John Burnet’s Greek Philosophy: From Thales to Plato, Wilhelm Windel- band’s A History of Philosophy and, to a lesser extent, Archibald Alexan- der’s A Short History of Philosophy, although other sources were clearly used in a more sporadic fashion. The extent to which Beckett deviated from his two main sources, the identity of those texts, likely reasons for his doing so, and the effect on his work is only now becoming apparent. Before considering these manuscript resources it is worth considering those critical works written before their availability to scholars. These texts thus follow Beckett’s direction to consider Democritus and Murphy, and to- gether form something of an interpretive “pseudocouple” in their own right. Alice and Kenneth Hamilton’s book Condemned to Life, which includes their essay “The Guffaw of the Abderite: Samuel Beckett’s Use of Democri- tus,” consider Democritus’ relevance to a selection of works including More Pricks than Kicks, “Enueg I” and, most substantially, Murphy. The congru- ence includes anecdotal similarities between the philosopher and various characters in Beckett’s oeuvre, as well as the illustration of an assortment of 4 Samuel Beckett, Beckett’s Dream Notebook, edited by John Pilling (Reading: Beckett International Foundation, 1999), xviii. 5 Matthew Feldman, Beckett’s Books: A Cultural History of Samuel Beckett’s “Interwar Notes” (London: Continuum, 2006). 70 SOFIA PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW Democritean tenets, including the unreliability of the senses, and the belief that bestowed the title of the “laughing philosopher,” whereby “cheerfulness must arise from within us and have its source in indifference to outward misfortune.”6 Sylvie Debevec Henning’s similarly-titled “The Guffaw of the Abde- rite: Murphy and the Democritean Universe” sees Murphy as a Menippean satire of philosophy, rather than a philosophy per se; a “farrago of philosophical systems”7 as opposed to an illustration of a particular metaphysics. The object of this satire is no individual philosopher but “monism” more widely, whose perpetrators include Parmenides and Leibniz. Opposing “the belief in the possibility of ultimate totalization and identity” (5), Henning argues that, in Murphy, “Democritean Atomism thwarts any attempt to syn- thesize the dyad or make its elements completely complementary” (7). De- mocritus is the figure alongside whom Beckett works to “accommodate the mess,”8 in defiance of diverse systems that seek to neutralize, expel or deny the chaotic. C. J. Ackerley’s annotations to Murphy, entitled Demented Particulars (1998, rev. 2004), show the almost incalculable richness of reference to the philosophers, and again afford Democritus some prominence. He casts the Greek philosophers in a particularly important role in Murphy, where the Atomists are the “microbes in the [Cartesian] ointment.”9 Ackerley affords these intruders the novel’s literal last laugh, stating that the “end of Murphy is a huge Democritean guffaw” (19), and follows Henning by suggesting that “Beckett found in the Atomists (Leucippus, Democritus, Epicurus and Lucretius) an ironic anticipation” of a world chaotic, “unclear and indistinct – in a word, absurd” (18). In the course of his annotations Ackerley also enumerates the particularly extensive debt to Pythagoras and his disciples, 6 Alice and Kenneth Hamilton, “The Guffaw of the Abderite: Samuel Beckett's Use of Democritus,” Mosaic 9/2 (1976), 5. 7 Sylvie Debevec Henning, “The Guffaw of the Abderite: Murphy and the Democritean Universe,” Journal of Beckett Studies 10 (1983), 20. 8 Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman, eds., Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Ltd., 1997), 219. 9 C. J. Ackerley, Demented Particulars: The Annotated “Murphy” (Tallahassee, FL: Journal of Beckett Studies Books, 2004), 21. “OF BEING – OR REMAINING”: BECKETT AND... 71 the most prominent gesture to which is Neary’s Pythagorean Academy in Cork, of which Murphy is a former pupil. David H. Hesla’s The Shape of Chaos employs ancient philosophers in a more diffuse fashion, supplying chapter epigraphs from a variety of figures, including Empedocles

Load more