Waiting for the Unknown A Study in Beckett's Waiting for Godot
BECKETT'S DEBTS OF INHERITANCE An attempt to introduce...
Transcript of BECKETT'S DEBTS OF INHERITANCE An attempt to introduce...
CHAPTER-I
BECKETT'S DEBTS OF INHERITANCE
An attempt to introduce Samuel Beckett as a writer is
doomed to be frustrating, because the whole corpus of his
works which includes poetry, fiction, criticism and drama
would definitely be frightening to any explorer, not simply
for its range, but mainly for the inscrutable profundity of
the mind that is buried in it. Moreover, on every genre which
Beckett chose to absorb and reshape he leaves the imprint of
his prodigious talent. His works reveal an intellectual orien
tation enriched by the European philosophical andliterary tra
ditions : he has assimilated not only the mythological-religi
ous response to life, but also the historical-materialist res
ponse, with the purpose of reconstructing it in art. But simul
taneously, Beckett has shown his orientation to the subjective,
idealist tradition of the 20th-century philosophy of Existen
tialism. This tradition asserted its influence in the inter-war
period, and since then, became the most seminal literary tradi
tion of the modern times, because the rich harvest of the works
of Proust, Kafka, Camus, Joyce and Sartre, along with those of
Beckett, belongs to this tradition.
What binds these writers together as one group is the
general world-view, grown out of their diverse responses to
2
the post-war scenario of life which include some attitudes
and insights common to all of them. They have tried to rein
terpret the human situation in relation to the universe, God,
nature and the society of men from an existentialist angle.
Beckett•s fiction reveals a passion for interpreting the
basic human situation from the point of view of one who
observes the stream of individual consciousness in his chara
cters. The progress of these characters as pilgrims for truth
and mystery of life charts the universal human response to the
absurdity of the world.
Secondly, all these writers are the inheritors of a re
vival of interest in man which owes much to the confluence of
modern thoughts in post-war Europe.
Thirdly, all these writers including Beckett in their
works reflect an affinity in their exploration of the basic
predicament of man, since they focus on the alienation of
modern individuals.
Lastly, these writers seem to be seriously occupied with
the problem of communication through rational and sequential
linguistic order.
What differentiates Beckett from these writers iS his
insistence on the quest for truth about the core of human exis
tence, the origin, the flowering and the dissolution of consci
eusness. He even probes deeper beyond the level of conscious
ness. Unlike these modern literary practitioners, Beckett
3
throws into focus the inescapable human situation, the angu
ish of the human self trapped in his existence, and the impo
ssibility of purposeful action in an absurd, disorderly world.
While these writers highlight the social relationships of in
dividuals, their pursuit of passion or of wealth and power,
Beckett concentrates on the essential aspect of human exper
ience. Unlike Beckett, these writers turn out to be the explo
rers of the circumferential aspects of human life which serve
to mask the basic anguish of human existence. The essential
human situation shorn of all the external trappings is there
fore the general theme in an absurd world.
The study of Beckett's philosophy will inevitably entail
a study of the whole philosophical tradition of Europe right
from the 17th century down to the later phase of the 20th
century. What Beckett shares with the philosophers such as
Zeno, Descartes, Geulincx, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzs
che, Heidegger, Camus and Sartre, he has made his own by trans
forming it into art. What L.A.C. Dobrez in his essay titled
"Beckett : the philosophical tradition" asserts is relevant
here :
If one can say that Beckett's novels often illus
trated in miniature the novel's historical deve-
lopment from the picaresque to the psychological
and beyond, one can with even more justification
argue that Beckett's work as a whole represents
nothing less than a literary recapitulation of
an entire tradition in philosophy from Descartes
and his contemporaries to the present day or, more
specifically, from the rationalist stream of the
seventeenth century to the Idealists and finally
to the existential movement1 •
4
This approach to Beckett's works in terms of 'a literary re
capitulation of an entire tradition in philosophy' is valid
because, what philosophies Beckett absorbed from the whole in
tellectual climate of modern times and whatever philosophical
orientation Beckett's works project, do not interfere with his
artistic creation. Indeed,all his debts of inheritance to
modern thought in terms of myth, philosophy, history, politics,
science, anthropology, nuclear war, etc., have enriched his
artistic vision and creative style. Whereas in Jean-Paul
Sartre's work the author as the existentialist philosopher and
the artist (i.e. the novelist, the playwright etc.) are indis
tinguishable, in Beckett it is the philosophy of an artist
that predominates. The works of Sartre, the existentialist
philosopher, and Sartre, the dramatist or novelist, are so
homogeneous that the artist and the philosopher are inextri
cable, because Sartre expresses his philosophy also through
his novels and plays. But in Beckett if there is any philoso
phy it is only one component of his total vision of life which
is expressed in his works of art. In this conn&tion, Beckett's
own assertion regarding this position as an artist is relevant
here, which he disclosed to Tom Driver :
When Heidegger and Sartre speak of a contrast bet
ween being and existence, they may be right. I
don't know, but their language is too philosophi
cal for me. I am not a philosopher2
•
5
Philosophy is inseparable from thought, and Beckett brings in
to focus the stream of thought which is an index to the living
ness of the living mind. In the process, the individual's con
sciousness of being in this world is registered, and thus phi
losophy is interwoven with expression of art-forms in Beckett's
work.
As already stated in the Pr€face ·, the present study
is an analysis of Beckett's fiction which seems to offer elu
sive glimpses of individual consciousness mostly along linear
time, of individual mind ( the microcosm ) in its interaction
with the world (the macrocosm).
II
What links Camus with Beckett is their projection of n-'ian
as a 'helpless victim of his ontological fate'. Beckett's ex-
periences as a participant in the Resistance Movement during
the German occupation of France did not inspire him to write
about the heroism of the people fighting against Hitler, be-
cause he was, as he said, 'not interested in stories of
6
3 success, oaly failure' • In this respect what Dr Rieuxstates
in Camus' The Plague is strikingly similar to Beckett's
approach :
I feel more fellowship with the defeated than with
saints. Heroism and sanctity don't really appeal
to me ••• what interests me is ---being a man4
•
This point of affinity between Camus and Beckett brings in
association series of characters in Camus• and Beckett's works
who are variations of modern anti-heroes, the successors to
Camus• Sisyphus. Camus• interpretation of the situation of
Sisyphus in The Myth of Sisyphus in the light of the philosQthy
of existentialism and the absurdity of human existence is a
milestone in the evolution of modern thought. The salient as-
pects of the situation of Sisyphus are : the consciousness of
being trapped in a tragic situation, the sorrows revived by
memory, the wretchedness of defeat and the inevitability of
degeneration and death as the nemesis for being born in this
world. This tragedy becomes all the more poignant in the face
of the stark loneliness of being in the world of being doomed , to alienation. As Camus says 'that Sisyphus is the absurd
hero' engaged in a futile 'effort of a body straining to
raise the huge stone, to roll it and push it up to a slope a
5 hundred times over' is actually the very symbol of a futile
and fruitless action 'measured by skyless space and time with
out depth''6
• The stone which becomes part of the life of the
7
mythical Sisyphus symbolically assimilates man's conscious-
ness of life as a burden of inescapable sufferings. But in
this very consciousness Sisyphus becomes •superior to his I
fate' and •stronger than his rock'. Camus further adds : If
this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious •
••• Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every stage 1 7
the hope of succeeding upheld him •
As Oedipus unknowingly obeyed fate and therefore did
not suffer till the awakening of the consciousness of what
he committed , the mythical Sisyphus too enjoyed happiness
unconscious of his actions, because 'from the moment he knows
8 his tragedy begins 1 • The human situation becomes tragic only
after human consciousness and knowledge link man to the absurd
world, particularly the knowledge of fruitless exercise in a
sterile situation and damnation in respect of existence as a
prison of time and space. The knowledge that there is no high-
er destiny and that death and defeat are inevitable compels
the individual to the act of contemplation and the revival of
memory of time past; memory also is a precondition for such a
doom, since memory cannot offer true freedom or any kind of
relief --- except the occasional relief of reminiscence of
past happiness --- from the inescapable existential anguish.
In this context what Samuel Beckett asserts in his essay on
Proust is relevant here :
For the purposes of this synthesis it is con-
venient to adopt the inner chronology of the
Proustian demonstration, and to examine in the
first place that double-headed monster of dam-
9 nation and salvation --- Time •
8
Consciousness of time regulating human thought of be-
ing and nothingness is a phenomenon reflected in the charact-
ers of Beckett --- a phenomenon which can also be traced in
Camus• characters confronting time present and death as in-
escapable realities. What Dr Rieux in The Plague contemplates
is remarkably analogical as an attitude common to Camus• and
Beckett's characters : 'It was undoubtedly the feeling of
exile --- the sensation of a void within which never left us,
that irrational longing to hark back to past or else to speed
up the march of time, and those keen shafts of memory that
stung like fire•10
• It is a response of the alienated indivi-
dual to the claustrophobic situation of objective life. The
culmination of such an attitude is found in Meursault in The
Outsider through the consciousness of the absurd estrangement
of the character from his mother in the context of her death
and funeral. Strangely, Molloy in Beckett's novel begins his
exploration of the consciousness of being by reverting to the
concept of mother as a quest for truth in his onward journey.
This search for truth persists in almost all the novels of
Beckett as a crusade of the individual in his attempt to trace
his consciousness in its very origin, as evident with reference
9
to the claustrophobic 'caul' ruminating on his birth and
his mother. What Malone in Malone Dies thinks as 'a strang-
er to the joys of darkness' is also a striking analogy to
the reflections of Camus' anti-hero in The Outsider :
Then he was sorry he had not learnt the art of
thinking, beginning by folding back the second
and third fingers the better to put the index
on the subject and the little finger on the verb,
in the way his teacher had shown him and sorry
he could make no meaning of the babel raging in
his head, the doubts, desires, imaginings and
dreads. And a little less well endowed with
strength and courage he too would have abandon-
ed and despaired of ever knowing what manner of
being he was and how he was going to live, and
lived vanquished, blindly in a mad world, in the
11 midst of strangers •
While &eckett's characters are determined to solve the
riddles concerning their identity, not by taking refuge in
mysticism but by seeking the help of rationality~since man can
face absurdity with the shield of rationality alone, Camus'
characters try to conquer absurdity by moving towards the
counter-idea of revolt since man can create without any help
from God his own values. What Dr Rieux asserts is a means of
overcoming the absurdity of an alienated consciousness :
That all men die is a problem we can do very
little about, but all men oppressed is a con
dition we can ameliorate12
•
10
Again, in The Rebel Camus' hero is encouraged by the possi-
bility of collective endeavour or of a sense of solidarity in
suffering through sharing :
In an absurd world the rebel has still one cer-
tainty; it is the solidarity of men in the same
advEnture, the fact that the grocer and he are
13 both oppressed •
Though consciousness is the main focus in Camus' and
Beckett's novels, it is mostly the social consciousness of an
individual trapped in an absurd world which is the overriding
issue among Camus• novels in the progression of thought. On
the contrary, what Beckett projects through his characters is
the consciousness of an individual outside the socio-political
milieu, apparently, engaged in a struggle to liberate himself
from the claustrophobic world.
Problem of communication impelled Beckett as an obses-
sion, so much so that it goaded him to various modes of exper-
!mentation with language and its syntax. Sometimes, as in
Waiting for Godot, the absurdity at the core of existence is
expressed in terms of a new syntactical order to mirror the
11
disorder or lack of patterR and logic in this world. Lucky's
tirades which are marked by 'logorrhoea' actually recapture,
through the disruption of syRtactical order, the void and the
disorder of the world. In this coRn~~ion what Ruby Cohn finds
out is quite revealing :
In Beckett's work, coherence is jarred at every
level --- the cosmos, the plot, the person, the
sentence. In the "wordy-gurdy" of his protagonists")
monologues, we are persuaded by our dizziness of
his heroes• authenticity. They know no respect
for time or place; they disdain sequence and pro
portion. But they must not be too readily confus-
ed with their creator. Unlike Sartre and Camus,
who paint an absurd world in logical word and
syntax, Beckett strives for a more mimetic art.
Cosmic absurdity is reflected by non-concatenation
of incidents~ as in the fiction of Kafka; personal
disintegration is reflected by syntactical frag-
14 mentation, as in the drama of Ionesco •
III
Nine years after Marcel Proust's death Beckett's mono-
graph on Proust was published (1931), which Beckett wrote with
a measure of detachment, since he had no personal relationship
with Proust as he had with Joyce. Melvin J. Friedman's comment
on Beckett's assessment of Proust is illuminating as a clue to,
12
and as a turning point in, Beckett's career as a literary
critic; Friedman viewed this essay as an exercise 1 rather
like entering through a forbidden back-staircase,an approach
which has always tempted him'15
•
Since Beckett's essay ?roust was on the French writ-
er's ~n searcb of Lost Time) novel, A la recherche du temps
perdu, the critical analysis entailed the reading of all the
sixteen volumes of Nouvella Revue of Frangoise edition. This
essay is a monumental work in that brief as it is, it encapsu-
lates Beckett's understanding of.the variegated genius of
Proust, while at the same time it focusses on Beckett's affi-
nity with Proust and also on the interest generated in him by
Proust's single voluminous novel. Actually what Beckett explor
ed in Proust was the outcome of his own interpretation of
Proust's achievement. That is why what R.N.Coe observes on
Beckett's Proust seems to be undoubtedly relevant to Beckett's
own work :
Its style is jejune in the extreme, a tapestry of
academic bun mots decorated with cornucopia of
metaphors; however , discarding this tiresome ver-
biage and discounting the occasional platitude,
Proust reveals itself not only as one of the first
really serious analyses in depth of A la recherche
du temps perdu, but as a sort of preview of almost
all the main themes in Beckett's later work16 •
13
While rereading Beckett's monograph on Proust in the
light of the novels Beckett wrote later, one discovers that
Beckett was perhaps writing as much about the future shape of
his novels as about the French novelist. In this connection
Frederick J. Hoffman's (Samuel Beckett : The Man and His Works,
p. 82) observation on Proust is significant : instead of con-
sidering Beckett's critical acumen in this essay he considers
it as 'a prolegomenon to the novels and plays (of Beckett) to
come• 17 • Just as Andre Gide discovered his own creative self
while writing his monograph on Dostoevsky, or as Thomas Mann
offered a new glimpse of his own creative self in his work on
Goethe, Beckett seems to have absorbed both creative power,
aesthetic vision and a literary technique from Proust a~ also
from Joyce.
What Beckett noticed in Proust's style was actually a
mode of concentration of metaphor which Beckett defined as
follows
The Proustian world is expressed metaphorically
by the artisan because it is apprehended meta-
phorically by the artist : the indirect and com•
parative expression of indirect and comparative
perception. The rhetorical equivalent of the
Proustian real is the chain figure of the meta:-
18 phor •
The examples Beckett himself chooses from Proust in
Beckett's own translation may be pertinent here. Proust
14
defines love as 'Time and space made perceptible to the
heart•. The second example from Proust relates to the des-
cription of the suffering of the lover engaged in a strenuous
attempt at forgetting Albertine, the beloved , 'The lion of
my love trembled before the python of forgetfulness'. Strik-
ingly, what Beckett discovers as 'the rhetorical equivalent
of Proustian real' in terms of series of metaphors or as com-
ponents of metaphors may be treated also as the 'rhetorical
equivalent' of Beckettian reality. In Molloy the hero as narra
tor tries to describe a situation but the attempt is thwarted
when he tries to describe the scenario realistically. Though he
begins with the characters named 'A' and 'C', in the process of
narration/invention they change, and the landscape gets trans-
formed :
So I saw A and C going slowly towards each other
unconscious of what they were doing. It was on a
road remarkably bare. I mean without hedges or
ditches or any kind of edge, in the country, for
cows were chewing in enormous fields, lying and
standing, in the evening silence. Perhaps I'm
inventing a little perhaps embellishing, but on
the whole that's the way it was. They chew,
swallow, they after a short pause effortlessly
bring up the next mouthful. A neck muscle stirs
and the jaws begin to grind again. But perhaps
19 I'm remembering things •
15
When Molloy again tries to recapture the origin of his con-
sciousness with reference to his mother, the very act of re-
capturing becomes a metaphor, rather unconsciously and invol-
untarily; "cursed taste of the shit". Actually, this is the
significant aspect of Beckett's Proustian legacy, which
Beckett tried to absorb and express in his own fiction. The
startling point of Proust's distinction, however, as Beckett
himself notes, is the series of images in Proust which have
an approximation to the world of vegetation :
It is significant that the majority of his
images are botanical. He assimilates the
human to the vegetal. He is conscious of
humanity as flora, never as fauna. There is
20 no black cats and faithful hounds in Proust •
What Beckett infers in his approach to Proust's work is also a
direction to the readers of Beckett : 1Here, as always, Proust
is completely detached from all moral consideration. There is
no right and wrong in Proust nor in his world 121 • Beckett him-
self adopts a mode of detachment in his novels in which his
heroes or other characters appear to be spectators. Moreover,
Beckett does not show any particular interest in any sort of
mythical, historical, religious, social and ethical aspects of
life, since all these issues stand away from the central prob-
lem of his exploration of human consciousness operating through
human existence. That is why Beckett's characters are also in-
different to the ethical or moral issues in their lives.
16
Probably Beckett inherited his detachment and amoral atti
tude from Proust.
This affinity in terms of the attitude of detach
ment can be best understood in the context of the characters
created by both the novelists. Proust'scharacters are in a
sense the predecessors of Beckettian antiheroes. Beckett's
insight into Proust's technique of characterization is actu
ally an amplification of the existentialist situation con
fronted by Beckett's creatures, representing the tragic neme
sis for the 'sin of having been born'.
The essential issues which Beckett discovered in
Proust offer other points of affinity between Beckett and
Proust; for instance, Beckett elaborately discussed Proust's
concepts of time, the role of memory, and also the function
of habit as a mental exercise. These three concepts are ana
lysed by Beckett as formulation of the Proustian principle.
Time, Habit and Memory, in a sense, are manifestations of the
subjective awareness of the perceiver in relation to the world
perceived. Thus all these three issues may also be considered
as functions of the human mind and consciousness. What one
finds in Beckett's novels is a stream-like progression of
thought or consciousness along linear time, which also may in
clude thoughts about~ time past, i.e. memory. What Virginia
Woolf categorizes as 'linear time' and 'mind time' are actu
ally the variations of progression in time, inclusive of
17
shifts in time, from past to present and from present to
future or otherwise. What Beckett interprets as the Proust-
ian concept of time as 'a double-headed monster', a pendulum
bringing damnation and salvation, is actually a formulation
of Beckett's own concept of time as viewed through the con-
sciousness of his characters. For example, Malone's consci-
ousness continues to flow at a crucial moment of his exist-
ence :
Dead world, airless, waterless.
That's it, reminisce.
- - - - - - - - - - -In the old days I used to count, up to three
hundred, four hundred, and with other thing
too, the showers, the bells, the chatter of
the sparrows at dawn, or with nothing, for
no reason, for the sake of counting, and then
I divided, by sixty. That passed the time,
I was time, I devoured the world. Not now, any
22 more. A man changes, As he gets on •
Beckett in his essay Proust interprets Proust's chronology as
Dostoievskian, since the plot is marked by a ' spasmodic' se-
quence of events, with characters (and also themes) obeying
'an almost insane inward necessity'. The point is clarified
further by Beckett when he tries to summarize Proust's artis-
tic mode : 'In time creative and destructive Proust discovers
18
f . ,23 . . i himsel as an art1st • Memory as an exerc1se 1n consc ous-
ness of time past actually regulates human thought. Since
consciousness is inconceivable in isolation from time, human
consciousness gets inextricably related to consciousness of
being in time, from time past to present and to future. In
Beckett's fiction and also in his plays the burden of exis-
tential angst is proved to be insupportable without the sus-
tenance derived from the recollection of time past; otherwise
one cannot go on living after the knowledge of Sisyphian fut~
lity in the face of the horror of nothingness and void in this
godless universe. Thus memory not only regulates human thought
in Beckett's works but also regulates man's existence. The
affinity between Beckett and Proust in this respect may be
highlighted with reference to Beckett's play Krapp's Last Tape
and Proust's novel A la recherche du temps perdu; the point of
view from which the Marcel of past time objectively confronts
the Marcel who grows old in course of the narrative is actually
paralleled in Beckett's representation of Krapp's recollection
of the past moments of happiness in love, seen from the dis-
tance of the time present. What Richard Macksey observes with
reference to Proust's narrative technique may be applied to
Beckett's style of representation too :
Thus the action can be linked to an Odyssey or
pilgrimage where the traveller in time has for-
gotten the location of the homeland or the sig
nificance of the shrine24
•
19
Beckett's characters, Molloy, Malone, the Unnamable and the
hero of How it is are all lost in the bleak world of 'mind
time'. They want to escape time, though any hope of escape is
an impossibility. Eugene Webb observes an analogy between
Proust and Beckett's points of view :
For Proust, as for Beckett, life in the temp-
oral world, except when one's awareness of it
is deadened by habit --- 'Habit is a great
deadener'~ says Didi in Waiting for Godot
25 --- is largely painful •
Habit is not only man's second nature, Beckett clari-
fies in Proust, "Life is habit". One's true self lies behind
habit. When one switches over from one habit to another one's
true self comes out during this shift. Beckett clarifies fur-
ther the concepts of memory and habit in Proust, when he says
that "Memory and Habit are the attributes of Time-cancer" •
Since habit engenders the feeling of security and leads us to
a sense of identification with objects or interests or deeds,
it naturally builds up an image of our false personality and
itself becomes a hindrance to our quest for self or truth.
This point is amplified a little further by Beckett
From this Janal, trinal, agile monster or Divin-
i ty : Time ·- a condition of resurrection because
an instrument of death: Habit -- an infliction in
20
so far as it opposes the dangerous exalta-
tion of the one and a blessing in so far
as it palliates the cruelty of the other ;
Memory -- a clinical laboratory stocked with
poison and remedy, stimulant and sedative :
from Him the mind turns to the one compensa-
tion and miracle of evasion tolerated by His
.... i '1 26 ~yranny and v g~ ance •
Since breathing is a habit, so life is an extension of habits
in the time-scale of the conscious life of an individual. The
succession of habits may be an extension of the individual's
consciousness. Thus the world Beckett the creator perceives
as phenomenon is a construction of the mind , and the success-
ion of everyday orientation that habit enchains us to implies
Beckett's ( and also Proust's ) contempt for mechanisation or
automation of habitual exercise. The periods of transition
from one habit to another may initiate a change of habit which
again may lead to the discovery of real nature. Because the
action of habit "being precisely to hide the essence - the
idea" ceases during a period of transition and thus the seek-
er of truth may burrow into his mind for an answer. AS early
as 1931 he realizes that what is necessary is not only des-
truction of habitual forms of existence, but also the surren-
der of rational control. He surrenders himself totally to the
'disintegrating flux of time', unlike the classical author
who always attempts to control it :
The classical artist assumes omniscience and
omnipotence. He raises himself artificially
out of Time in order to give relief to his
chronology and causality to his development.
Proust's chronology is extremely difficult to
follow, the succession of events spasmodic, and
his characters and themes, although they seem
to obey an almost insane inward necessity, are
presented and developed with a fine Dostoie-
vskian contempt for the vulgarity of a plau
sible concentration~ 7
21
But this relinquishment of control means a different
and latent control which is the 'almost insane inward necess-
ity' of Proust's writing. In his works Proust weaves round
his centr«l theme a fascinating tapestry of personal recoll-
ections in such a manner as to embrace the duration of a re-
trospective existence. The experimentation in Beckett's own
later works reveals both the dissolution of a narrative super-
structure and the ·obsessive 'inward necessity' of the mono-
logue. Thus Beckett draws upon the Proustian tradition of
weaving the fabric of consciousness in verbal forms only :
For Proust the quality of language is more
important than any system of ethics or aes
thetics28.
22
Organic structure to Proust is neither an authentic virtue
nor an essential one in a novel. Proust's tricks of 'peti-
tes lf1rases • and leitmotifs and foreshadowings of the future
evolution of his characters are in fact tricks and clumsy
devices that make Proust an outcast from the tradition of
French literature. Here is an excerpt from By Way of Saint-
Beuve :
And if Guermantes does not disappoint one as
all imagined things do when reduced to reality,
this is undoubtedly because at no time is it a
real place, because even when one is walking
about in it, one feels that the things one sees
there are merely the wrappings of other things,
that reality lies, not in this present but for
elsewhere, that the stone under one's hand is
no more than a metaphor of time and the imagi-
nation feeds on Guermantes visited as it fed on
Guerrnantes described because all these things
are still only words, everything is a splendid
29 figure of speech that means something else •
In his search for reality Beckett, like Proust, peels off lay-
ers of apparent reality, and this process jars the coherence.
He is a follower of Proust, but he goes further than Proust
dares. No logical language or syntax is used in Beckett's
writing :
23
Last reasoning last figures number 777777
leaves number 777776 of his way unwriting
towards number 777778 finds the sack with-
out which he would not go far takes it un-
to himself and continues on his way the
same to be same to be taken by number 777776
in his turn and after him by number 777775
and so back to the unimaginable number. I
each one no sooner on his way than he finds
i i b h. . 30
the sack nd spensa le to 1s JOurney •
IV
In Samuel Beckett's universe James Joyce was the sun.
The most important spell of influence Beckett absorbed in his
artistic development was that of James Joyce. Beckett spent the
golden years of his life in France. After receiving his B.A.
degree from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1928, Beckett left Ire-
land for Paris to take the post of a lecturer in English at the
Ecole Normale superieure. During the first month of his sojourn
in Paris, Beckett met Joyce. He was simply awed by Joyce who
was so impressed by the handsome Irish young man that he
engaged him as the principal translator for the French version
24
of his Anna Livia Plurabelle, a section of Work in Progress.
Thus began the most memorable and fateful relationship, both
personal and literary, between Beckett and Joyce. Beckett
considered Joyce as the greatest among the writers of the
20th century. He wrote to McGrevy : "Joyce had a moral effect
h d 1 . t' ' . t ' n 31 Wh B k t on me, e rna e me rea lZe ar lStlC ln egrlty • en ec e t
was beginning to formulate his own ideas about writing, he
started to imitate not only the literary principles and style
of Joyce but also Joyce's mannerisms. In the prime of his
life Beckett was swallowed up by Joyce the writer as well as
Joyce the man. Beckett 'gave Joyce all the love and devotion
32. he gave to his own father' •
The issue of affinity between Beckett and Joyce has
acquired so much importance that quite a number of writers,
such as, M.J.Friedman, Hugh Kenner, Eugene Webb, Harry Vandru-
lis~ W.Y.Tindall, Ruby Cohn, Phyllis Carey and Ed Jewinski,
Deidre Bair, John Fletcher, Barbara Reich Gluck. have examin-
ed this aspect as Beckett's legacy of inheritance, from vari-
ous points. Abel Lionel's "Joyce the father: Beckett the son"
is an example of the basis of such interpretations. His curi-
ous essay on Joyce's Finnegans Wake, •our Exagmination', re-
fleeted Beckett's profound admiration for his idol who remain-
ed so as his hero throughout his life. He showed his contempt
for that section of i:he reading public who failed to appreciate
the genius of Joyce. He wrote, "And if you do not understand
it, ladies and gentleman, it is because you are too decadent
to receice it"~ 3 So Joyce became his model whose work
sustained his literary taste and guided him in "the grim
business of survival amidst uncertainties, ambiguities"::4
The manner in which Beckett introduces himself in
'Dante --- Bruno --- Vico ---Joyce' underscores his
consciousness of co~nitment to the Joycean pasture as the
fountain of sustenance for him as early as 1929 :
And now here am I, with my handful of
abstractions, among which notably : a
mountain, the coincidence of contraries,
the inevitability of cyclic evolution,
a system of Poetics, and the prospect of
self-extension in the world of Mr. Joyce's
35 'Work in Progress•.
25
In terms of "the prospect of self-extension in the world of
Mr. Joyce's 'work in Progress'", the creative phases of
Beckett's life may be established as both Joycean or Post-
Joycean work in progress by Beckett.
A study of the complex interaction of Beckett and
Joyce should take into account the 'danger' of neat
identifications with 'an exactitude of application' Beckett
warns us about :
26
Must we wring the neck of a certain system in
order to stuff it into a contemporary pigeon-hole,
or modify the dimension of that pigeon-hole for
the satisfaction of the analogymongers ? Literary
criticism is not book-keeping:6
From the beginning of his literary career Beckett was
highly fascinated by the modernist experiments in form and
style, and since Joyce was one of the most prominent innovators
of this experiment, Beckett was particularly impressed by what
he regarded as the perfect fusion of structure and content in
Joyce. He wrote admiringly of Joyce's Work in Progress :
Here form is content, content is form ••• His
writing is not about something ; it is that
37 something itself •
This formulation on Joyce is also an application of Beckett's
technique in his plays and novels. Waiting for Godot is the
example of the culmination of this technique of the fusion of
theme and structure; while the play objectifies •waiting•,
it orchestrates the theme in terms of the stage images of
waiting. In his mature novels which include his trilogy, this
assimilation of content and form has been achieved aesthetically.
27
It may be noted as a coincidence that both Joyce and
Beckett resolved to make a career of writing with poetry in
the first phase and an analytical essay on major literary
predecessors : essays on Ibsen by Joyce and on Proust by
Beckett are cases in point. Again, just as More Pricks than
~icks (1934),. the first endeavour of Beckett to write in the
prose form, presents a series of stories connected by a
common character, Dubliners (1914) is also Joyce's first
attempt at a series of short stories, united by a common theme.
More Pricks than kicks focusses on a chronological sequence
of Belacqua's life trom his student days to his burial. The
name of this 'anti-heroic' protagonist derives from the fourth
Canto of Dante's Purgatorio. Dante was one of the strongest
bonds between Joyce and Beckett. In this connedion what Aldo
Tagliaferri in the essay "Beckett and Joyce" asserts is not
fully acceptable :
The very concept of the Unnamable can be
I considered an offshoot of Ulysses' Nameless
One, and the enigmatic use of the letter M. 38
comes straight from Joyce.
Beckett might have consciously derived his concept of the
Unnamable from Joyce's Nameless One, though Beckett's
configuration of Consciousness as the Unnamable, which can
be differentiated frcm the Namable (which is dust), is
something unique and original. Moreover, what Tagliaferri
28
observes about Beckett's borrowing of the letter M.'straight
from Joyce• is sweeping, inadequate and partly wrong; since
the writer does not care to substantiate the point. More
probably, the use of the letter M., both in Joyce and in
Beckett, was a conscious legacy from Dante's Divine Comedy
which opens with the description of a journey (Inferno) thus:
Midway this way of life we're bound upon,
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
where the right road was wholly lost and gone.
(Penguin edition of Canto I, 11 1-3,
translated by Dorothy L. Sayers)
There are several points of analogy between The
Divine Comedy and some sections of Ulysses in terms of
characterisation, aesthetic theory, technique - particularly
'Odyssey motif' -- and imagery. Beckett also absorbs many
elements from Dante, including figures and characters. In
terms of the Odyssey-motif, and of the visions of infernal
suffering as part of existential angst, Beckett reinterprets
Dante in More Pricks than Kicks.
In A Portrait of the Artist as a young n-..,_111 Stephen,
like Dante, dazzled by the light of Paradise and the
revelation of the celestial rose, feels himself •swooning
into some new world ••• A world, a glimmer, or a flower?
Glimmering and trembling, trembling and unfolding, a breaking
light, an opening flower ••• wave of light by wave of light,
29
flooding all the heavens with its soft flushes39
• Stephen
transforms Dante's divine 'claritas' into the radiance of
human experience. Thus Joyce appropriates Dante's religious
'pieta' into his own developing vision of the artist. Beckett
also responds to Dante's 'pieta', both in image and in
language, but his appropriation of Dante's 'pieta' is totally
in contrast to that of Joyce. Stephen wants to transcend the
daily experience, but Belacqua tries to translate the suffering
of existence into 'rational concepts and cliches'. Thus Joyce
and Beckett were deeply moved and influenced by Dante, but
both in their own ways. Immersed in a meaningless surrounding,
Joyce's hero wants to escape into the epiphanic vision of a
true artist. Beckett's heroes go further. Belacqua likes to go
back to the darkness in the womb, 'in the caul on my back in
">40 the dark for ever • Beckett's first novel ~~, his only
fiction having the framework of a traditional novel, may be
compared with Joyce's Portrait both of which are experimental
in a deeper sense, and at the same time apparently unexper~ental
because of their conventionally realistic structure. In Murph¥
the author narrates the tragi-comic antics of Murphy in London
who flees from women, unlike Joyce's Leopold Bloom, and in
doing so, gets into a lunatic asyl~m, not as an inmate, but as
a sympathiser, and finally dies there in his garret. Though
unlike Joyce's hero, Hurphy is not given to silent introEpections,
both of them bubble 1.-1i th the characteristic wit of Irishmen. As
Friedman says : 'But the Irish Wit which is so plentiful in
41 Joyce overflows into Beckett's work'
30
The next novel Watt is written in an extremely
unconventional narrative technique. The form and content of
this plotless novel are inseparable from each other. Like Joyce
in his later novels Beckett believes that it is not the task
of the artist to fulfil the logical narrative expectations of
his readers. So in Watt, one finds long passages, with monotonous
irrelevant words which instead of goading thought, impede it.
His experiments with language can be traced in his practice of
alliterating words, reversing letters in words, inverting the
word-order in sentences and sentence-order in paragraphs. Given
below is an example of Beckett's use of monotono~sequence of
words intended to mock the narrative sequence of action in
traditional novels :
The ordinary person eats a meal,then rests from
eating for a space, then eats again, then rests
again ••• and indeed I may add thirst, to the
best of his ability and according to the state
42 of his fortune • •
Beckett thus borrows one of his major devices directly from Joyce
in order to emphasize his own vision.
Another featun:~ that Beckett shares with Joyce is the
narrational need to keE:!p his heroes constantly moving from one
place to another. This motif is named as •odyssey motif' by
Friedman in his essay 11Samuel Beckett : an Amalgamation of Joyce
and Proust 11• Beckett's heroes are constant wanderers in search
31
of •self', the inner 'I', and so he finds the 'Odyssey motif'
most suitable for his narrative purpose. It is, therefore,
woven thr~ugh the main thematic structure of his French trilogy
(translated into English by himself ) Molloy,
Molone Dies and The Unnamable : Molloy, Moran, Malone,lhnamable
are 'all engaged in some sort of quest•. In Joyce the quest is
to enter into the sublime artistic region to find out the truth
at the centre of external reality. In Beckett the quest is to
uncover the inner self, to excavate the inner 'I'. Man exists
alone and bound in time waiting for something latent in life to
ooze out and give it meaning and direction. Perhaps 'that
something' will illuminate the true inner self of man. The
tangible representation of social reality or of community life
is totally absent in Beckett. His characters gradually move out
of the objective reality of time and space, rejecting the world
of phenomena and the bodily functions, so much so that even the
desire to identify one's location and other space-time
contigencies ceases to work. Thus the whole fabric of thought
in his fiction turns out to be just an inner space. Though the
main themes of Beckett: 's fiction are of exile and alienation
from society, the heroes relentlessly strive to forge an
interface between the unified mind and body by checking or
preventing any resultant split between the two. The verbal
texture and character-delineations focussing on habits and
idiosyncracies of individuals give him some remarkable &finity
with Joyce. The stones that Molloy sucks, the pencil-stub that
32
Malone chews, the recurrent references to bicycles and
umbrellas are symptoms of an almost primitive addiction to
'totemistic practice'. This reminds one of Stephen Dedalus
carrying an ashplant and of Bloom's holding on to his
shrivelled potato.
The young artist Stephen Dedalus recognizes himself
to be a member of the community, and while keeping his
relation to the community intacts he also learns the artistic
techniques of individuation. Beckett, being a member of the
community, amalgamates his own individual talent with the
tradition and accepts the task to forge in the smithy of his
soul the uncreated conscience of his race. Adrienne Monnier
has rightly observed that Be<;kett is 11 a new Stephen Dedal us
43 striding all by himself along the strand 11
•
It is a new trend in modern Beckett criticism to focus
on the points of difference between Beckett and Joyce.
Beckett's own assessment of their relationship is revealed in
the famous Israel Shenker interview :
The kind of work I do is one in which I'm not
master of my material. The more Joyce knew the
more he could. He's tending toward omniscience
and omnipotence as an artist. I'm working with
impotence, ignorance. I do not think impotence
44 has been exploited in the past •
33
The contrast between Beckett's impotence and Joyce's
omnipotence accounts for the main dichotomy between their
aesthetic perceptions and creativity. Beckett's trilogy serves
to provide ill ustrat~ions of the areas of contrast with Joyce's
fictions. Malone presents a 'parodic reversal' of Molly Bloom:
he is lying in bed, partially paralysed, writing a monologue
and trying hard to stop all bodily processes while Molly Bloom
moves to and from her chamber-pot. Malone is a lonely figure
while HCE (the hero of the Finnegans Wake) is surrounded by
family patrons and 'the whole family of Man'; dreaming of the
past and spring-time and holding death at bay lies HCE, but
Malone (as Beckett represents the reversal of natural proces~s
through him) encounters death, which is a very difficult and
diligent ordeal, consciously striving for death : 'I could die
today, if I wished, merely by making a little effort, if I
45 could wish, if I could make an effort" • While Joyce's sentences
build, accumulate, extend, expand,,these of Beckett are intended
'to annihilate all they purport to record'.
Joyce's characters often merge and flow : characters
like HCE and ALP flow into one another so smoothly that the
readers are not aware of the exact moment of such inner shiftings.
Individuals may come in contact with different types of people
like robbers, giants, old men, young men etc., but Joyce always
meets himself through such figures in fiction. Beckett's world
offers a different gl:lmpse of human figures who never come close
34
enough to allow self-recognition for the author or readers
through them. They may be 'a gallery of moribunds' but they
are stubbornly diffe:!rent from each other and from real people
in society ; they simply pass each other in a straight line
without any interaction.
In Joyce a single properly placed letter can have
multiple meanings. But in Beckett words are 'shit' and so
they are not the stuff of creation. The nameless hero of the
Text for Nothing laments :
That's right, wordshit, bury me, avalanche,
and let there be no more talk of any creature,
nor of a world to leave, nor of a world to reach,
in order to have done, with worlds, with creatures,
46 with words, with misery, misery, misery •
How it is is to some extent, Beckett's Joycean work, with the
echoes and patterns of Joycean language, in which the
desiccated static Beckettian void is presented through a
difficult syntactica.l order having no punctuations and giving
a verse-like appearance. Quoted below is such a typical passage:
a body what matter say a body
see a body all the rear white
originally some light spots still
say grey of hair growing still
that's enough a head say a
head say you've seen a head
all that all the possible a
sack with food a body entire
alive still yes living stop panting
let it stop ·ten seconds
fifteen seconds hear this
breath taken of life hear
it said say you hear it good
47 pant on •
35
The typographical innovations that do away with punctuation
like comma or full-stops, capitals (except for proper names)
and allow only breath-pauses inside the biblical-style verse
passages are not purposeless. They are intended to faithfully
transcribe a colloquial voice that can utter words till it
pants rather than according to grammatical syntax in the
process, a new syntax is created in keeping with colloquial
speech, with verbs and conjunctions suppressed, and this
enables Beckett to break away from the form of conventional
fiction. The very elements of 'well-made fiction' are reduced
to Beckett in such a manner that the langua~e in his fiction
deletes the traditional narrative properties, and the
conventional development of sequence is replaced by a movement
tov.;ard silence.
36
Just as the characters like Watt are relegated to
'the dim world behind' as indistinguishable from it, so th~
language in Beckett 'made of words others• words' (The
Unnamable ) reveals a patient, relentless effort to attain
to 'the texture of a fundamental impasse•. The protagonists
are haunted by the knowledge that 'words' are inadequate,
though necessary and powerful, tools of communication. What
Beckett's characters generate in his readers through their
attitude to life is what H.V.Vandrulist calls ~ndeterminacy•,
which he defines thus :
Indeterminacy is the situation Molloy faces when
his utter lack of a destination means that no
road is the right road - or the wrong road. Clearly
Molloy does not face an entirely negative situation,
48 just a radically indeterminate one •
Actually Beckett's works offer a kind of creative response to
the challenge and anxiety of the influence of Joyce's Work in
Progress. This response is so complex and occasionally so
inscrutable that one can have an access to this interaction
only through Beckett himself. Beckett suggested that one should
consider this relationship between himself and Joyce inversely
patterned in terms of their works. When Beckett observed, 'the
more Joyce knew, the more he could', Beckett moved to a
different direction : 'I am working with impotence, ignorance'.
In terms of his fictional works, Beckett's development may be
37
interpreted as a progression towards 'a counter-Joyce
d. . 49 ~rect~on , as Andrew ~ennedy rightly points out. This
'counter-Joyce' movement can be traced quite early in
Beckett's creative response to his compatriot, Joyce, who
gradually becomesthe archetype of the artist as craftsman,
as investigator, as the discoverer and also as the originator
of patterns of thought, Beckett chooses to focus on 'impotence'
in response to Joyce's 'omnipotence', as he realizes 'I do
not think impotence has been exploited in the past'. The
paradigm that H.Vandrulist discovers in Beckett's later works
as the mode of his artistic orientation is aptly defined as
'Beckett's work in Hegress'. This phrase represents Beckett's
movement "toward a representation, or enactment, of failure,
incompetence and silence". This illuminating analysis of
Beckett's response to Joyce as a 'regress• explores the strength
of Beckett to counter the tremendous anxiety of the influence
of James Joyce, the arche.typal artist as the omnipotent
creator. In spite of their differences in orientation as
writers, what strikes one as the singular mark of affinity
between them is their idea of art as a 'painstaking craft' and
their severity of ~esthetic standard.
To say that Beckett had been strongly influenced by
Joyce is no detraction,though nor is it very easy to define
precisely the interaction between Beckett and Joyce in the
sense of the term 'influence'. What kind of 'evidence' is
called 'influence' cannot be precisely demonstrated. However,
38
there is enough scope to trace the force of Joyce's influence
on Beckett while exploring the 'misreading' of Beckett's
fiction, as recent criticism suggests. Joyce has a great
effect on Beckett, but Beckett also chose to rewrite Joyce's
later writings, Beckett supplied Irish lore, helped Joyce
in checking references and sometimes provided him with
solutions that Joyce was searching for; while Joyce embraced
every sphere of knowledge, language and experience, Beckett
doubted everything to formulate an 'impossible art', the
achievement of which would always ensure his distinctive
place.
v
T .s .Eliot in his essay 11Tradi tionar-:d:theindi vidual
Talent 11 argues that to praise those aspects of a literary
work in which the author least resembles his predecessoD.!
39
is the general critical practice. In his opinion this approach
is not wholly sound. He further says :
We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet's
difference from his predecessors, especially
his immediate predecessors ; we endeavour to
find something that can be isolated in order
to be enjoyed. Tffhereas if we approach a poet
without this pregudice we shall often find
that not only the best, but the most individual
parts of his work may be those in which the
dead poets, his ancestors, assert their
immortality most vigorously50 •
Applying this logic one will find that Beckett's talent shines
more brightly in the most original parts of his work in which
the influence of Kafka is evident. Among the earlier writers
whose names have almost inseparably become associated with
Beckett, Kafka is one, whose influence on Beckett has become
almost a cliche. Karl Ragnar Gierow, the Permanent Secretary
40
of the Swedish Academy, had reiterated in 1969 in his
address on the presentation of the Nobel Prize to Beckett
"For Beckett, the forerunner of new modes of expression in
the novel and the drama, is a man of traditions, because he
51 is also a member of the family of Joyce, Proust and Kafka".
Kafka's writings cast long shadows on Beckett's mind
from a long time, and Beckett himself noted his serious
reading of Kafka : "I've only read Kafka in German- serious
reading except for a few things in French and English --
only The Castle in German"52
• Beckett can be located within
the modern tradition of the artist's own unique language,
which has been defined as 'the language of self' by Hoffman,
tracing its through Kafka to Beckett, in his book Samuel
Beckett: The Language of Self {1962). Both Beckett and Kafka,
for their unusually bleak assessment of man and of human
condition have become the most fascinating and important though
disturbing, of the twentieth-century writers • B~th
writers attempt to free man from the inconsistency and
contingency of a purposeless universe, of a morality, divorced
from any, sanctioning power•, under the influence of
Nie~he's bleak ideas of 'Death of God' and of a life 'beyond
Good and Evil'.
The first and foremost element that brings together
Kafka and Beckett is their pessimistic philosophy. The world
41
that is reflected through the works of both is the absurd
world where an individual strives after the 'surd', for
reaching the 'ideal core' an irrational quest, man's
desperate search for 'self', for an identity that lies
beyond the rational bounds or frames of 'reality'. Beckett's
heroes find themselves inextricably caught up in the problems
of beginning and ending, of living a life as an exile, a
punishment for some unknown crime, perhaps the crime of being
born. Death just simply annihilates the problems of living
such a life without solving them. Death appears to be the
main subject of Beckett's work, particularly of his trilogy.
Death is also implicit as the situational mainspring of Kafka's
stories. A Kafka hero sees more and more clearly till he sees
his own death: K. says to Olga in The Castle : "If a man has
his eyes bound, you can encourage him as much as you like to
stare through the blindfold but he'll never see anything.
53 He'll be able to see only when the blindfold is removed" •
That Beckett is an inheritor of the Kafkaesque tradition
is a commonplace criticism • Critics usually exemplify it in
the first instance by a comparative study of Kafka's Castle
and Beckett's ~· It is a known fact that during 1938-44,
Beckett's reading of Kafka's Castle was embroyonic to the
composition of ~· The themes of both are simple but
puzzling. In The Castle a man called K. has ostensibly been
called to take up a job in a village where there is a castle.
42
He arrives one evening in this village wishing to occupy
his allocated position. But those who have summoned himknow
nothing of his appointment; so he is not accepted. He is
turned away. The rest of the book is spent in his repeated
attempts to get himself accepted. The outline story of Watt
also presents the baffled attempts of a man called upon to
perform an apparently simple task. Watt sets out to join as
a servant at Mr Knott's house where he works first on the
ground floor and then on the first floor. But he learns
nothing either about Mr Knott whom he has been serving all
the while, nor about the actual length and then returns to
the ordinary world. Thus written as they are in the third
person narrative form, both the stories deploy their unique
symbolic techniques to represent man's archetypal quest for
knowing the unknown and the unknowable. The Castle first
appeared as a monologue written in the first person. But
afterwards the omniscient narrator takes the place of the
first-person narrator : gradually •r• dissolves into 'K'. In
Watt the first two parts are presented through different
characters; the next part is narrated in the first person,
and then Sam becomes the narrator. Perhaps K. represents
Kafka, and Sam represents Samuel Beckett, though the stories
are not autobiographical , K. does not know his position or
his rights at first; he does not even seem to know the castle.
Sam always draws a curtain of doubt over everything and
everybody :he doubts Watt's memory and often he doubts his
own memory. This is chiefly because Sam finds out that in
43
speaking to him, 'tiatt inverts the "order of the letters in
the word together with that of the words in the sentenc8
together with that of sentences in the period". This sense
of uncertainty is the comrron thematic ground between Watt and
The Castle.
~vatt and K., the two protagonists, desire to see and
know certain enigmatic figures : Mr Knott and Count stand for
the ultimate goal of these two individuals. Both the figures
have no definite shape or identity and also delegates come from
them. Watt sometimes feels the presence of Knott, but gets
no idea of his physical features even when he knocks against
him. Thus man's search for the 'unknown' is represented
through these multidimensional depictions of experiences or
perceptions of reality in the two novels. In this pursuit the
world of sensual existence and the world of reflection are
found to be in a ceaseless clash. As a result, in Kafka's novel
man's frenzied pursuit of his own elusive self becomes
configurated in Count, who is the typification of God, and in
Beckett's novel Knott, who represents the Absolute, symboli~s
the basic absurdity at the centre of the universe.
Beckett's trilogy often reminds one of Kafka's The
Castle. Molloy, the first book of the trilogy, has Moran as
the hero of the second part. On a sunday in summer Moran is
informed by Gaber, the messenger of an agency, run by Youdi,
44
that he has to leave at once with his son to look for an
individual called Molloy. Youdi's organization with its
network of messengers and agents is similar to the system
of authority in the Count's Castle. Both Youdi and the
Count are unapproachable, remote, and consequently, seem
godlike to Moran and K. Beckett's 'misfit' heroes are
identical to Kafka's nonheroes, who always fail in their
quests and as such 1~ey become Kafkaesque counterparts
engaged in endless and futile quests -the 'faceless'
individuals in search Qf grace- ·in this godless world.: Beckett• s·
heroes are, in a way, all artists, all writers (some by
themselves, some with the help of deputy) and so they are
creators. They exhibit a disgust for life. Beckett examines
layer by layer the mind of the creator. Thus his novels turn
into apparently disorganised streams of 'heavily punctuated,
disembodied thought". Kafka's heroes try to unite being and
thing, concrete life and abstract thinking, the unconscious
and the conscious. Prof. Enrich describes the duality which
constitutes the essemce of modern novels : "The reaction
against L-the modern, scientific abstract_? way of thinking,
which dissolves everything concrete L-into mathematical
qualities_? is strongly evident in Kafka L-as it is in
- 54 Goethe_/".
The basic difference between Kafka and Beckett has
been pointed out by Beckett himself :
45
The Kafka hero has a coherence of purpose. My
people seem to be falling to bits. Another
difference you notice how Kafka's form is
classic, it goes on like a steam roller almost
serene. It seems to be threatened the whole
time -- but the consternation is in the form.
In my work there is consternation behind the
t . 55
form, no ln the form •
Kafka's heroes have a social setting : they are men for whom
life is impossible to be separated from their functions in
society. But Beckett's heroes are put within the framework
of an 'unsetting' having no reference to society. These
'misfit' heroes of Beckett are trapped in an existential web.
Kafka permits his characters to experience hope, but Beckett
depicts the characters, for the most part, as despairing,
agonizing and irreverent. Kafka's novels have definite
chronology : in The Castle six days of K. 's life are described,
with each chapter followed by the next one sequentially, and
each paragraph linked with the preceding one. But no simple
chronology is followed in Beckett's novels, as the author of
Watt so characteristically introduces its narrative method
in the fourth part :
[dLfference you notice how Kafka's form is
cla sic, it goes on like a steam roller
behind
It seems to be threatened
but the consternation is
there is consternation
55 in the form •
46
Kafka's social setting : they are men for whom
life is impossibl be separated from their functions in
society. But Becket •s heroes are put within the framework
of an 'unsetting' ha ing no reference to society. These
'misfit' heroes of Be kett are trapped in an existential web.
Kafka permits his char cters to experience hope, but Beckett
depicts the characters, most part, as despairing,
agonizing and irreverent. Kafka's novels have a definite
chronology: in The Castle six days of K.'s life are
se~uentially, and each parag linked with the preceding
one. But no simple chronology s followed in Beckett's novels,
as the author of watt so introduces its
narrative method in the fourth p rt J
As Watt told the beginning of his story, not
first, but second, so not fourth, but third,
now he told its end. Two, one, four, three,
that was thE! order in which Watt told his story. u • t . 56 nero1c qua ra1ns are not otherwise elaborated.
47
There are differences between Kafka and Beckett in
respect of their treatment of love. In Kafka love is often
identified with pity. In The Trial the accused K. goes for
the first time to his lawyer seeking help and advice. But
while he is still waiting for admission, the lawyer's mai~
Leni, gives herself to him. To Leni all clients are
beautiful, and she feels pity for them, but her pity is
aroused not by any positive qualities but by one's defects.
In The Castle K. 's affair with 'Frieda • (which in German
means 'peace') acquires a significance in relation to the
theme of K.'s quest for truth. Freda sleeps with K. on the
bar-room floor. She is Klamra's mistress. Thus by establishing
a sexual relationship with Frieda, K. comes vaguely into
contact with the mysterious Castle and thus indirectlyfulfils
part of his yearning to reach the Castle. Thus in Kafka sex
or love is man's indefatigable search for a tangible mode of
connection with the world despite his exclusion from it.
But love only forms episodic affairs in Beckett(except
in Murphy, for Celia's love for Murphy is central to the main
plot), because love affairs seem to have no relevance to the
hero's quest. In ~, for example, the sexual activities
between Watt and the fishwoman Mrs Gorman has no relevance
to the main theme of Watt's search for Mr Knott's identity,
for a live contact with the reality that is Mr Knott. Ruby
Cohn observes in her essay :
Momentarily pleasing as Mrs. Gorman is to ~att,
she arouses his mental more than his sexual
prowess; she becomes another event to exorcize
by explanation, in the way Watt cannot exorcize
Mr. Knott and so he is finally compelled to
leave the establishment, more ignorant than
when he came precisely by all he does not learn
57 "of the nature of Mr. Knott" •
48
In Molloy, Molloy strongly hints that Lousse, whose dog was
run over by Molloy, rescu.es him from mob fury and gives him
food and lodging for sexual reasons. But when Molloy departs
she makes no attempt to hold him back. This partiallyreflects
Beckett's ironical attitude to romance or courtship. Hugh
Kenner points out that Lousse may have symbolised for Molloy
what Calypso symbolised for Odysseus i.e. a temporary need
and fascination in his continuing quest.
In Kafka the plots are plausi~le, the action of heroes
are credible because they reason about events and their
adventures in course of their pursuits. But in Beckett the
plot is most often devoid of any pattern of causal sequence,
in which comic humour and irony are interwoven. Like competent
clown Beckett even plays up the slapstick comedy and wraps all
his writings in 'a most humorous sadness•. But unlike Kafka's
hero, Beckett's hero is not sustained by any hope. Though
Ruby Cohn's comparison implies that a Beckettian character
58 suffers disintegration or decay .of reason , it is a common
49
point of analogy between Beckett and Kafka that reason is
always the mode of exploration of reality in both these
authors.
Through the discomfitures of K. and Watt, Kafka and
Beckett have given a new interpretation of t}le myth of the
questing hero. Ruby Cohn rightly observes . . "Both these
failures are, as Beckett describes in a later creation,
paradigmatic of the human species. As such, they have a
unique appeal for that species, in all the urgency of its
"59 helplessness • Beckett seems to have been inspired by
Kafka's commitment to the representation of the negative as
his ultimate goal :
What is laid upon us is to accomplish the
60 negative : the positive is already given •
The power to 'accomplish the negative • is, in a sense, the
power to cope with the absurdity of the world, which both
Beckett and Kafka have persevered to recapture in theirworks.
50
1. L.A. C .Dobrez, The Ex is tenti al and its Exits (Athlone
Press, London, 1956), P.51.
2. Tom Driver, "Beckett by the Madeline", Columbia
Universi!:y Forum (Summer, 1961). P 21.
3. Samuel Beckett:, Waiting for Godot, Introduction and
Notes by Javed Malick (Oxford University Press,
New Delhi, 1989), P 16.
4. Albert Camus, The Plaaue translated by Stuart Gilbert
(Penguin Modern Classics, Harmondsworth,Middlesex,
England, 1960; 1984), P. 209.
5. Albert Camus, 'The Myth of Sisyphus', The Myth of
Sisyphus (Penguin Modern Classics, Harmendsworth,
Middlesex, England, 1984), P. 108.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid, P. 109.
8. Ibid.
9. Samuel Beckett:, Proust (Grove Press, New York, 1931),
P.1.
10. The Plague, P.60.
11. Samuel Beckett:, Three Novels by Samuel Beckett ( Grove
Press, Inc, New York, 1968 ), P. 193.
12. The Plague, P. 48.
13. Albert Camus, The Rebel (Penguin Modern Classics,
Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England, 1959; 1984),
P.18.
51
14. Ruby Cohn, Samuel Beckett : the comic gamut( Rutgers
University Press, New Brunswick, New Jercy,1962),
P.294.
15. 1-l.J.Friedman, "The Novels of Samuel Bec:-<:ett: An
P>.rnalgam of Joyce and Proust", Comnarative
Literature XII, ('..-Jinter 1960), P.47.
16. R.N.Coe, Samuel Beckett, (Oxford University Press,
London, 1968), P.92.
17. Frederick J. Hoffman, Samuel Beckett : The Man and his
Works (Forum House Publishin'] Company, Toronto,
1969), P. 82.
18. Samuel Beckett, Proust, P.67-68. (All references to
this essay are from this edition Henceforth only
page numbers will be mentioned.)
19. Samuel Beckett, Molloy, in Three Novels £y Samuel
Beckett, P.8.
20. Proust, P.68.
21. Ibid. P.68.
2 2. Samuel Beckett:, Malone Dies, in Three Novels by Samue}.
Beckett, P. 201.
23. Proust, P. 59.
24. Richard ~acksey, "The Architecture of Time : Dialects
and Structure", Proust : A collection of Critical
Essays; ed. Rene Girard (Prentice-Hall, INC.,
Englewood Cliffs, N.J.,1962), P. 108.
25. Eugene Uebb, Samuel Beckett : A Studv of His Novels
(·Peter 0\ven Ltd., London, 1970)., p.
26. Proust, P. 22.
27. Ibid., P. 621o
28o Ibid., P. 67.
29. Marcel Proust, By Way of Saint Beuve, translated by
Sylvia Townsend \'Jarner (Chatto & 1:/indus, London,
1958), P. 182.
52
30o Samuel Beckett, How it is (Grove Press, New York, 1964),
P. 136. All subsequent references to this text are
from this edition.
31. Ruby Cohn, Back to Beckett : (Princeton University Press,
Princeton, 1973), P. 14o
32. Deirdre Bair, A Biography: Samuel Beckett (:Lowe·and
Brydone -Printers Ltd.·, Thetford, Norfolk, Great Britain, 1978),p.83.
33 0 Samuel Beckett, Our Exagmination Round His Factification for
Incamination of Work in Progress : "Dante ... Bruno
••• Vico ••• Joyce 11 (Faber and Faber, London, 1929),
P. 13o All references to this essay are from this
edition.
34. Hugh Kenner, A Reader's Guide to Samuel Beckett (Thames
& Hudson, London, 1973), P.73.
35o Samuel- Beckett, 11 Dante ••• Bruno ••• Vico ••• Joyce",op.cit.p.3.
36. Ibid., P.3-4.
53
3 'l. Ibid, P. 14 Emphasis original.
38. Aldo Tagliaferri, 'Beckett and Joyce•, Modern Critical
Views : Samuel 3eckett ed. with an Introduction by
Harold Bloom (Chelsea House Publishers, New York,
198:)) I P. 2~1.
39. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young~,
ed. Seamus Deane, (Penguin Books Ltd., England,
1992), P. 187.
40. Samuel 3eckett, More Pricks thankicks, (Grove Press Inco,
New York, 1973), Po32.
41. Melvin J. Friedman, "The Novels of Samuel Beckett : An
Amalgum of Joyce and Proust", Comparative Literature
XII, (Winter, 1960), P. 51.
42. Samuel Beckett, Watt (Calder and Boyars, London, 1953,
19~0) P. 190. All references to this novel are from
this edition.
43. Deirdre Bair, Op. cit. P. 70o
44. Israel Shenker, 'Moody Man of Letters•, The New York
Times (May 6, 1956), sec 3o
45. Samuel Beckett, 1 Malone Dies• in Three Novels, P.179.
46. ::;amuel Beckett, 11 '.l.'exts for Nothing 11, Stories anu Texts
for Noth.~~ (Grove ~'Jeidenfeld, New York, 1967),
P. 118.
47. Samuel Beckett, How it is, P. 105.
54
48. Har:r;yVandruiist, SamueL Beckett~s Work in Regress : A Study of the Fiction to 1953, (National Library of Canada, Ottow-a, 1993}, p.4.
49. Andrew Kennedy's phrase •a counter-Joyce direction•
quoted in H. Vandrulist•s introduction to ~·Jerk i~
Regr~, P.2o
so. T.S.Eliot, The Sacred vlood : Essays on Poetry and
Criticism, "Tradition andth~Individual Talent,<)"'
(Methuen & Co. Ltd., London, 1953), Po 48.
51. Karl Ragnar Gierow, "Presentation Address", printed in
the edition of Samuel Becket's HappY Days (Faber
and Faber, London, 1961), .p.3.
52. Quoted in Ruby Cohn, 11 \'latt in the light of The Castle 11,
Comparative Literature XIII (University of Oregan,
Spring, 1961), P. 154.
53. Franz Kafka, The Castle (tr. from the German by Willa
and 2dwin Muir (Penguin Books Ltd., Middlesex, 1952,
Reprinted 1962), P. 218.
54. 'dilhem Emrich, KJ;:anz Kafka (A thane urn Verlag, Frankfurt,
1958), P. 85-87.
65. Quoted in Gunter Anders, Kafka (Bmves and Bowes, London,
1960), P. 23. Emphasis mine.
56o Samuel Beckett, Watt P. 214.
57. Ruby Cohn, "~ in the light of The Castle" 1 Op 0 Ci t.,
Po 165.
58. 11 Unlike K. who presumably reasons even on his deathbed,
Hatt•s mind breaks down 11, ibid., P. 166.