I delivered this presentation from memory at the above conference in UCD, as part of their Beckett and the 'State' of Ireland series, this was the final conference. Fergal Whelan invited me along, we met up again in Cork in 2019, so six years later, at the 2nd Gare Saint Lazare How It Is symposium which was held in the Crawford Art Gallery as part of the summer festival in June where we were both presenting essays on Comment c'est How It Is.
This essay Embodying "Be-Ing" - Beckett & Heraclitus was first published in More Micks than Dicks - a hybrid Beckettian novella in 3 genres which was published by Famous Seamus in 2017. The book was printed 3 times in the course of its first year of publication, selling 1000 copies. The book is now out of print, which is a shame as it offers a rather unique perspective into Beckett's work coming as it does from a fellow Irish writer following a modernist outlook in the 21st century.
This book is currently retailing at £82 on Amazon
https://www.amazon.co.uk/More-Micks-Than-Dicks-Beckettian/dp/0955685796
Here are two short films which I made yesterday, 4th May, when normally I would have presented my paper 3/4s or The Missing Quarter at the 3rd Gare Saint Lazare Players How It Is convention which was scheduled to take place in Reading University which houses the International Beckett Center. This event had to be cancelled due to Covid 19, so I went Live from my home yesterday and gave an informal presentation of part 2 of More Micks than Dicks which is the paper Embodying Being - Beckett & Heraclitus. I've uploaded the entire text below as it appears in this work, but you may wish to watch these two films in which in the first I give a background into why I got started on all of this, the second film then is the actual presentation of the text proper, I deviate a lot from the text giving snippets of further papers etc.
https://www.facebook.com/100035784744122/videos/243476500188506/
https://www.facebook.com/100035784744122/videos/243512706851552/UzpfSTEwMDAzNTc4NDc0NDEyMjpWSzoyNjMyMDgzMjM3MTE4MzU3/
Embodying ‘Be-ING’ – Beckett and Heraclitus[1]
https://www.facebook.com/100035784744122/videos/243476500188506/
https://www.facebook.com/100035784744122/videos/243512706851552/UzpfSTEwMDAzNTc4NDc0NDEyMjpWSzoyNjMyMDgzMjM3MTE4MzU3/
Embodying ‘Be-ING’ – Beckett and Heraclitus[1]
‘L’artiste qui joue de son être est de nulle
part. Et il n’a pas des frères.’
‘The artist who stakes
his being is from nowhere, has no kith.’[2]
This quote is taken from
Beckett’s homage to Jack Yeats which was written in 1954, but which expresses
ideas that he had already formulated about the role of the artist over twenty
years previous while contemplating the life and work of Marcel Proust.
For the artist, who does not deal in surfaces, the
rejection of friendship is not only reasonable, but a necessity. Because the
only possible spiritual development is in the sense of depth. The artistic
tendency is not expansive, but a contraction. And art is the apotheosis of
solitude.[3]
Already, the theme of
exile is introduced and its correspondence with the artist, be it voluntary or
imposed. Joyce and of course Dante spring to mind, but also a much older
predecessor one who is the subject of this presentation – namely Heraclitus of
Ephesus. Also known as, ‘the Obscure’.
Friedrich Nietzsche, in his series of lectures on the
Pre-Platonic philosophers[4],
wishes to remind us of the historical events which inform the writings of
Heraclitus. Fragment 121 is singled out to illustrate his point, underlining
the political events which underlined the philosopher’s life.
The Ephesians would do
well to end their lives, every grown man of them, and leave the city to
beardless boys, for that they have driven out Hermodorus, the worthiest among
them, saying, “We will have none who is worthiest among us; or if there be any
such, let him go elsewhere and consort with others.[5]
Heraclitus was to famously exile himself to the Temple
of Artemis, where he was to appear outside playing dice with children. Heraclitus
makes his first appearance in the writing of Samuel Beckett’s in 1934, with the
publication of his first printed work in prose More Pricks than Kicks, appearing in the chapter Yellow[6].
But today, I wish to focus on his appearance in Beckett’s last epic take on the
novel in French Comment c’est/How It Is which
was published in 1961, and so a period of almost thirty years separate the two
works. A fact showing how important Heraclitus is in the writings of Samuel
Beckett. Three fragments from the first part of the book avant Pim/before Pim will be examined. Firstly, the invocation
which is contained in the first two fragments on the opening page, and in which
the Muse makes a faded appearance. Secondly, fragment two in which she appears in
all her glory as Auctoritas and the
Viconian structure which underlines the whole work is revealed through the
three themes le voyage, le couple and
l’abandon [7].
Finally, the fragment where Heraclitus appears himself will be examined, before
concluding the presentation with a cursory nod to two contemporary philosophers
and their correspondence with Beckett ; namely Roberto Esposito and Alan
Badiou. But, before we go straight to the three fragments in question, we must
first pass by the Muse.
1.
The Motif of the Muse
Σίβυλλα δὲ μαινομένῳ στόματι καθ' Ἡράκλειτον
ἀγέλαστα καὶ ἀκαλλώπιστα καὶ ἀμύριστα φθεγγομένη χιλίων ἐτῶν ἐξικνεῖται τῇ φονῇ
διὰ τὸν θεόν
The
Sibyl with raving mouth utters solemn, unadorned, unlovely words, but she
reaches out over a thousand years with her voice because of the god within her.[8] (Heraclitus- Fragment 92)
In studies of the appearance of the Muse in Homer classical
scholars, such as Elizabeth Minchin, speak of both ‘faded’ appearances and
‘full’[9] . In the fragment below, taken from Book 2 of The Illiad, the Muse makes a full appearance clearly being named in
the text while in the second extract, taken from Book VIII, she appears unnamed,
yet clearly she is being alluded to in the context of the setting, appearing as
she does before a list of names and events which will be narrated, acting as
she does serving in what Minchin describes as a ‘meta-narrational function’[10] appearing at ‘critical
moments in the story’[11].
Example
of a ‘full’ appearance of the muse.
• ‘These
were the captains of Achaea and the Kings. Now tell me, Muse, who were
the bravest of them all, of the men and chariot-teams that came with Atreus’
sons?’
(Book
II, lines 759/761) [12]
Example
of a ‘faded’ appearance.
• ‘Who
was the first Trojan the marksman Teucer hit?’
(Book
VIII, line 313.)[13]
The invocation appearing in Comment c’est is interesting in this respect, as following on from
Minchin it would appear to be a ‘faded’ invocation as the Muse is not actually
named but is alluded to in the act of the invocation itself. In Frescoes of the Skull[14]
, James Knowlson categorically refutes that it is the Muse in the traditional
sense whom Beckett invokes, but rather posits that it is Beckett invoking
himself. For Simon Perris[15]
however, the appearance of an invocation is ‘a highly charged literary manoeuvre’,
particularly in the area of Homeric reception.
Invocations are part and parcel of the epic tradition, epic poems by
definition being of tri-partite structure, as defined by Aristotle in his Poetics, and according to Mikhail Bakhtin ‘occasionally so deeply embedded as to be
almost invisible’[16].
comment c’était je cite
avant Pim avec Pim après Pim comment c’est trois parties je le dis comme je
l’entends
voix d’abord dehors quaqua de toutes parts
puis en moi quand ça cesse de haleter raconte-moi encore finis de me raconter
invocation [17]
how it was I quote before Pim with
Pim after Pim how it is three parts I
say it as I hear it as I say it
voice once without quaqua
on all sides then in me when the panting stops tell me again finish telling me
invocation [18]
2. Introduction of the Muse and
the Viconian Superstructure which underlines Comment c’est.
We have to wait a further
22 pages before the Muse is introduced to us in the guise of Autoritas and in which she (elle)
appears within the Viconian context she
is situated. Anthony Cordingley[19] posits that ‘l’ordre
natural’, or natural order, is referring to the natural order of French
Grammar, which was conceived at Port Royal during the time of the
Enlightenment. He makes reference to the appearance of Malebranche[20] and other
‘Occassionalist’ philosophers such as Arnold Guelincx, who was a life-long concern
of Beckett’s[21] to further substantiate his claims. This
presentation offers an alternative philosophical perspective, in which the
linguistics of Saussure is replaced by Giambattista Vico, and the metaphysics
of Malebranche by Heraclitus.Vico’s three ages, as expounded in his New Science, correspond exactly to the
three themes inserted in the Autoritas fragment
in Comment C’est. Le voyage, or
wandering, corresponding to Vico’s first, or ‘divine’
age,
peopled
by giants, the Muse and divinari, or diviners, whose role was to interpret the language
of the Muse who spoke to them in the place of God, through signs. Le
couple, or the couple, signifying the heroic or second age when violence
rules, and finally L’abandon, or the
abandon, corresponding to the third age which is ruled by human reason and
which finally implodes so the ‘natural order’ l’ordre naturel can start all over again, thereby revealing the
cyclical order of civilisations. In Book IV of
La scienza nouva, Vico uses
this same language: ‘diritti naturali’[22],‘l’ordre natural’, or
‘natural law’ in English[23].
je le dis comme elle vient dans l’ordre mes lèvres
remuent je les sens elle sort
dans la boue ma vie ce qu’il en reste mal dite mal entendu mal retrouvée quand
ça cesse de haleter mal murmurée à la boue au présent tout ça des choses si
anciennes l’ordre naturel le voyage le
couple l’abandon tout ça au présent tout bas des bribes[24]
I say it my life as it comes natural order my lips move I
can feel them it comes
out in the mud my life what remains ill-said ill recaptured when the panting
stops ill-murmured to the mud in the present all that things so ancient natural order the journey the couple
the abandon all that in the present barely audible bits and scraps [25]
As has been mentioned before, the idea of invoking the
muses goes right back to ancient Greece. Hesiod the author of the Theogony, a
primitive creation myth, introduces them ‘Within Olympus, telling of things
that are,/ That will be, and that were’[26]. This backs up the
earlier comment on Aristotle about the construction of epic poetry, but more
importantly helps to further illuminate the genesis of the dividing tri-partite
structure of Comment C’est; it is a
novel which promises to tell the story of
‘comment c’etait je cite avant Pim avec Pim après Pim’/‘how it was I
quote before Pim with Pim after Pim’. So, already we have the motif of the
invocation, and the whole structural scaffolding of the novel, all borrowed and
conforming to the epic. In The Dialogic
Imagination, Mikhail Bakhtin refers to
this kind of novel as the ‘adventure
novel of everyday life’, using The
Golden Ass by Apuleius as a model. The theme of metamorphosis is key in
such a work, giving the form its particular chronotope, shifting as it does
from the everyday to that of ‘adventure’. In The Golden
Ass, for example, we see ‘Lucius before his transformation
into an ass, Lucius as the ass and Lucius mysteriously purified or renewed’[27]. Likewise, in Comment C’est we see the metamorphosis
of the narrator before Pim, with Pim, and after Pim. There are, however, other
links to Hesiod and his Theogony.
Surprisingly, despite a comprehensive two page analysis of the possible
significations of the ‘sac’/ ‘sack’, the late great Ruby Cohen in her review of
the novel[28] does not mention the
association of coal with fire, which the author would appear to be deliberately
signalling to us; ‘premier signe de vie’[29], ‘first sign very first
of life’[30]. The association with Prometheus, who stole
fire from Zeus to give to men and was so cruelly punished, would appear to be
quite clear, particularly as the phrase ‘du sac et du corde’ has ancient
associations with theft and punishment[31]. Prometheus is one of the
giants who inhabits Vico’s first age, dwelling solitary in the caves[32] . Also, Pandora would
appear to be hinted at in the ‘ la boîte’, ‘the tin’; ‘Boîte de merde’, being a
typical popular expression in French to describe a ‘shitty’ place which would
be apt considering all of the scatological references made in the text to the
‘boue’, or ‘mud’. In Book 2, Chapter 3, there is a remarkable passage in Vico’s
New Science in which he describes the origins of
the first giants who ‘wandered’ the earth,
descendants of Ham, Japeth and Shem, and who ‘Wallowing in their own faeces
(whose nitrous salts wondrously enriched the soil), these children struggled to
make their way through the great forest, now grown dense after the recent
flood’[33]. Vico’s pre-diluvian
vision of the world must have had a considerable effect on Beckett, as his interest
in the
Bible
was a life- long one and there has been some fascinating
studies on his reception of the Bible in his own work[34].
3.
Heraclitus Appearing as Divinari
τὰ δὲ πάντα οἰακίζει κεραυνός
When
asked to comment on the above fragment by Heraclitus, Martin Heidegger says the
following:
I remember an afternoon
during my journey in Aegina. Suddenly I saw a single bolt of
lightning, after which no more followed. My thought was:
Zeus.[36]
In
his New Science, Giambattista Vico notes:
Jupiter’s lightning bolts
were the origin of the first Muse, which
Homer calls the knowledge of
good and evil.[37]
Although
taking a considerable amount of flak for her Biography of Beckett, the
first
of its kind, Deirdre Bair very perceptively acknowledged Beckett’s debt to
French
Symbolists and the prose poem regarding the very particular composition of Comment C’est.[38] Here in the Heraclitus passage, which indeed
is exemplary of the whole text, Aristotelian
notions of grammar and logic do not push, or motivate, the grapheme[39], but rather, as in
Rimbaud’s Illuminations, sense precedes meaning to the extant,
rather like in the paintings of Francis Bacon, that we are being exposed to the
full shock of the nervous system of the artist, in this case Beckett, who
conjures in this fragment of tightly packed prose, once again, a nineteenth
century motif borrowed from Baudelaire in the guise of the Albatross. We must
not search for a logical coherence but rather a poetic correspondence, and one
which we can quite easily find returning to the context of Vico and the first
age. For, do not the ‘unholy’ trinity of Beckett, Rimbaud and Baudelaire not
strongly evoke the idea of the ‘theological poet’ of whom Vico speaks ? The
‘divine’ ones through whom the Muse speaks, and of whom Heraclitus himself is
so representative of, he the ‘diviner’ par excellence, exiled in ‘in the seclusion
of the Temple of Artemis?’[40] Beckett’s mud bound narrator is evocative of
the poet in the poem by Baudelaire, ‘Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées, Ses
ailes de géant l’empêchent de marcher’[41]. And, who is indeed so
reminiscent of so many of Beckett’s creations who precede him. Molloy, though,
most particularly, belly down too on the earth of the forest floor, a son of
Abel, dreaming of the sound of ewes, completely oblivious to the death blows of
the sons of Cain which will soon rain down upon him once again. Beckett’s
relationship with Arthur Rimbaud is also well established, appearing as he does
in
countless
letters[42], particularly in the
thirties. There also exists his translation of Le Bateau Ivre, which he completed in 1937.[43] The correspondence between Rimbaud and Vico,
in regards to the Heraclitus fragment in part 1 of Comment C’est , is deeply resonant, considering particularly its
topographical placement, situated as it is contextually in Vico’s corresponding
first age, the age of ‘divine’ seers. As Beckett notes, ‘Here form is content, content is form.’[44]
Or, as Vico puts it, ‘the poets were in Greek called mystae, initiates, a term which Horace translates as ‘interpreters
of the Gods’, for they explained the divine mysteries of the auspices and
oracles.’[45] Which in Rimbaud’s terms
translates, ‘Therefore the poet is truly the thief of fire. He is responsible
for Humanity, even for the animals; he
will have to have his inventions smelt, felt, and heard:’[46]Not interpreted by logic!
Nietzsche, and later Heidegger after him, would continuously remind us that
Heraclitus was a Pre-Platonic philosopher, in other words one who still very
much relied on other faculties of intelligence, outside of the strictly rational.
Beckett’s whole life’s work, in this respect, runs in a parallel trajectory to
the German duo.
sure le bas-ventre boueux j’ai vu un jour faste pace
Héraclite l’Obscur au plus haut de l’aZur entre les grandes ailes noires
étendus immobiles vu suspendu le corps de neige de je ne sais quel oiseaux
voilier l’abatros hurler des mers australes l’histoire que j’avais mon Dieu la
naturelle les bons moments que j’avais[47]
on the muddy belly I saw
one blessed day saving the grace of Heraclitus the Obscure at the pitch of
heaven’s azure towering between its black still spreading wings the snowy body
of I know not what frigate-bird the screaming albatross of the southern seas
the history I knew my God the natural the good moments I had[48]
The
fragmentary nature in which the isolated pieces of text appear upon the page,
given the thematic context which they would physically contain, would further
envelop, or embody, the whole enterprise with a calligrammatic element,
suggestive of archaeological and scriptural remains further supporting the
Viconian treatment of form, creating of the topography of the book itself a
very physical manifestation, or attempt, at a possibly newer take on the genre
that is itself, such is the subversion of it, being subverted; namely that of
the Epic account or journey in the tradition of Gilgamesh, the very first of its kind, (which was a three
dimensional text in the sense that it was sculpted in clay) continuing up to Finnegans Wake , Joyce being Beckett’s,
as always, fellow partner in crime. Indeed, the reference to Joyce is all
important, at this stage, considering the fact that we are now concerned with
the deep structural elements which underlie Comment
C’est. In his essay The Joyce that
Beckett
Built, Kevin J.H. Dettmar explores the degree
to which Beckett attempted to distance himself from Joyce after the fifties, in
other words just before the composition of the present work in investigation.
He builds an extremely interesting case of ‘Oedipal’[49] assassination on
Beckett’s side, claiming that the Joyce we know, as readers and critics, is
largely a fabricated creation of Beckett’s
penned by Richard Ellman and Isreal Shenker’s hands. It is a very interesting
theory, particularly as seen in the light of the Viconian context which is
being pursued here, as Joyce was famously to have used Vico as a structural support
on which to tie Finnegans Wake. Yet,
there is no mention of Vico, by Beckett, in regards to Comment C’est ? Which would add a peculiar emphasis to Dittmar’s
claim that ‘James Joyce may turn out to be not just Beckett’s literary master
but also his greatest literary masterpiece.’[50] Chronologically incompatible
yet connected through inter-textual cross referencing – Heraclitus via Vico –
these ‘discursive formations’[51]
, like all architectural tropes, bear out the multi-layered lineage of their
author’s individual point of intercession.
Samuel Beckett brings with him a plurality of voices, speaking together
as one, like Georgian architects such as James Gandon, before him[52].
Beckett’s
first contact with Giambattista Vico was in Paris, when Joyce suggested to him
the direction into the Wake via,
also, Bruno and Dante. The essay Dante...Bruno.Vico..Joyce was
eventually published in book form by Sylvia Beach (Our Examination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work
in Progress: Paris, Shakespeare and Company), and by
Eugene Jolas in Transistion 16-17.[53] Ruby Cohn, notes in her
introduction to Disjecta, ‘Beckett
read Vico’s Scienza Nuova, which he
then analyzed so acutely that, decades later, he is cited in Vico
bibliographies’.[54] It is quite clear, when
reading this text, how Beckett was impressed by Vico and his ideas on language,
myth and poetry.‘He may still appear as a mystic to some: if so, a mystic that
rejects the transcendental in every shape and form as a factor in human
development, and whose Providence is not divine enough to do without the
cooperation of humanity.’[55]
Conclusion
εἰδέναι δὲ χρὴ τὸν πόλεμον ἐόντα ξυνόν, καὶ δίκην ἔριν, καὶ γινόμενα
πάντα κατ' ἔριν καὶ χρεών
‘War- conflict- is
father of all,[56]’ (Heraclitus – Fragment 80.)
The Italian Philosopher Roberto Esposito, known
particularly for his theories on Biopolitics, in his book Pensiero vivente [57]makes reference to
the Italian Philosopher Ernesto Grassi in connection with Vico’s La scienza nuova and Heidegger’s notion
of Lichtung, or unconcealment. The
former’s ‘deforestation of the primeval forest’ being akin, he says, to
Heidegger’s influential notions on poetic truth being concealed in language.
But it is Esposito’s notions of the fundamental difference, as he sees it, between
an ‘Italian school’ of thought, being inclusive of Dante, Machiavelli, Leonardo
Da Vinci, Giordano Bruno, Giambattista Vico and the poet Leopardi, among
others, and the idea that what is fundamentally
different to ‘Italian’ thinking is the notion of corporality, or how the body
embodies thinking, an idea which is so central to all the thinkers mentioned
above. As Francesco De Sanctis puts it ‘la forza vince il diritto’[58] an idea which is all too
prevalent in Beckett’s Comment C’est. With
Democritus and Heraclitus, as first introduced in More Pricks than Kicks, the
figure of the two theatrical masks is evoked, the
faces of the tragic and comic muses, that is,
which hang above every stage. How appropriate it
is to find the twentieth century’s greatest
playwright obsessing about these two figures, to the extent that he revisits
them in the form of a satyr play in part 2, ‘avec Pim’ of Comment C’est. They being the paradigm encompassing all of human
nature, through their dichotomy unity is found. What Alan Badiou defines as
Beckett’s ‘generic humanity’[59]
in the context of his creations. The Viconian framework of the three ages, once
again, this time by placing the satyr play with the narrator and Pim in part 2,
corresponding as it does with Vico’s second age, that of the heroic advocating
force, and the stage is literally set for the eternal ‘comedy’ to begin again.
The grotesque inscription in Roman capitals on the buttocks, or armpits, of Pim
with the nails parodying ownership- property and possession being the
underlying themes, after the initial wanderings of the dispossessed in part 1,
a familiar trope in Beckett’s oeuvre. But it is only when we come to part 3, as
readers, that we appreciate to what extent Beckett wishes to elevate the whole
nightmarish vision, part 3 corresponding with Vico’s third age and human
reason. For this, Beckett employs the Hegelian dialectic to such an excess,
multiplying and further spawning his dynamic duos, or couplets, by the thousand
so that the unity of the closely observed, perfectly imperfect particular,
become blown up to represent the species, floating horrifically in some
Stalinesque parody. ‘M’AIMES -TU CON’[60] .
‘God on God’[61]the two protagonists lie,
be they: Zeus and Gandymede, Polyphemus and Silenius, Alcibiades and Socrates,
or Bim & Bom – the result, according to Beckett, is one and the same. It is
the rule which governs all comedy- here inserted into the copula- for one to
laugh another must cry. The thunderbolt steers all!
Bibliography
Beckett,
Samuel: Comment C’est, Les Éditions
de Minuit, Paris, 1992.
Beckett,
Samuel: How It Is, Edited by Édouard
Magessa O’ Reilly, Faber and Faber, London, 2009.
Heidegger,
Martin: Heraclitus, Seminars conducted
with Eugene Fink, Northwestern University Press, 1993.
Nietzsche,
Friedrich: The Pre-Platonic Philosophers, Translated from the German and
Edited, with an Introduction and Commentary, by Greg Whitlock, University of
Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, First paperback edition, 2006.
O’ Neill,
Peter: Embodying Be-ing: Beckett & Heraclitus, A New Ulster,
Belfast, Issue 48, August 2016.
Vico, Giambattista: New Science, Translated by David Marsh with an introduction by Anthony
Grafton, Penguin Classics, London, 2001.
www.lietteraturaitaliana.net Volume 7 – La scienza nuova – Biblioteca della Letteratura Italiana.
[1] This text first appeared in issue 47
of A New Ulster, 2016. Good on you
Amos!
[2] Beckett,
Samuel: Disjecta – Miscellaneous Writings
and a Dramatic Fragment, Edited by Ruby Cohn, Grove Press, New York, 1984,
pp. 148/149. (Hommage à Jack B Yeats, April 1954)
[3] Beckett,
Samuel: Proust and Three Dialogues with
Georges Duthuit, John Calder, London, 1987, p.64.
[4] Nietzsche,
Friedrich: The Pre-Platonic Philosophers,
Translated from the German and Edited, with an Introduction and Commentary,
by Greg Whitlock, University of Illinois
Press, Urbana & Chicago, ( First Paperback Edition) 2006.
[6] While awaiting the surgeon’s knife,
Beckett’s alter ego Belacqua meditates on
Heraclitus: At this crucial point
the good God came to his assistance with a phrase from the paradox of Donne:
Among our wise men, I doubt not many would be found, who would laugh at
Heraclitus weeping, none which would weep at Democritus laughing.’ And
again: For Belacqua could not resist a
lachrymose philosopher and still less when, as was the case with Heraclitus, he
was obscene at the same time. He was in his element in dingy tears and
luxuriously so when these were furnished by a pre-Socratic man of acknowledged
distinction. How often had he not exclaimed, skies being grey: ‘Another minute
of this and I consecrate the remnant of my life to Heraclitus of Ephesus, I
shall be that Delian diver who, after the third or fourth submersion, returns
no more to the surface!’ Beckett,
Samuel: More Pricks than Kicks,
Picador Books, London, 1974, pp. 148, 149.
[7] Beckett,
Samuel: Comment c’est: Les Éditions
de Minuit, Paris, 1992, p. 30.
[8]
Bobbs & Merrill: The Pre-Socratics: Translation by Philip Wheeler,
Indianopolis, 1966, p.75.
[9] Minchin,
Elizabeth: The Poet Appeals To His Muse:
Homeric Invocations In The Context Of Epic Performance, The Classical
Journal, Vol. 91, No. 1 (Oct-Nov, 1995) p.31.
[12] Homer: The Illiad, Translation by Robert
Fagles with and Introduction and Notes by Bernard Knox, Penguin Classics,
London, 1991, p. 124.
[14] Knowlson,
J & Pilling, J: Frescoes of the Skull,
The Late Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett,
John Calder, London, 1979.
[15] Perris,
Simon: Proems, Codas, and Formalism in
Homeric Reception, Classical Receptions Journal, Vol 3, Issue (2011), p189.
[16] Bakhtin, Mikhail: The Dialogic Imagination, Edited by Michael Holquist and Translated
by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holyquist, University of Texas Press, Austin,
2002,p.8. Bakhtin was referring to genres and how the novel, a modern
phenomenon, has assumed structures, particularly plotlines, from the ancient
Greek & Roman Classical tradition, and made them its own. Beckett’s use of
the invocation at the beginning of Comment
C’est is a classic example of such borrowings, but also how he continues to
use her in further appearances in the narrative, as this paper seeks to show.
[17] Beckett, Samuel: Comment C’est, Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris, 1992, p.9. All further references to this work
will be denoted in this essay by the abbreviation CC.
[18] Beckett, Samuel: How It Is, Faber and Faber, London, 2009, p.3.Further extracts from
this text will be denoted by the abbreviation HII, followed by the page number.
[19] Cordingley, Anthony: Beckett and “l’ordre natural”: The Universal
Grammar of Comment C’est/How It Is,
All Sturm and No Drang, Beckett and Romanticism at Reading 2006,
Rodolpi, Today/Aujourd’ hui, Edited by Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon, Amsterdam
& New York, 2007, pp.185-200.
[21]
In a note to Sighle Kennedy,
who was writing her dissertation on Murphy at the time, Beckett indicated
‘Naught is more real...’ and the ‘Ubi nihil vales...’.( Disjecta, p.113), the former being a nod to the pre-Socratic
Philosopher Democritus, and the latter a reference to Arnold Guelincx. That was
in 1967. As an indicator of just how far research has yet to go in Beckett
studies, the first full-length study of Beckett’s obsession with Guelincx was
only published in 2012.See- Tucker, David: Samuel
Beckett and Arnold Guelincx, ‘Tracing a literary fantasy’, Historicising
Modernism Series, Continuum, London, 2012.
[22] http://www.letteraturaitaliana.net/pdf/Volume_7/t204.pdf
- p. 445/550
[24] Beckett,
Samuel: CC. p.30.
[25] Beckett,
Samuel: HII. p.15.
[26] Wender,
Dorothy: Hesiod and Theognis, Penguin
Classics, London, 1973, p. 24.
[27] Bakhtin,
Mickail: The Dialogic Imagination- four
essays, Edited by Michael Holquist and Translated by Caryl Emerson and
Michael Holquist, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1981, p. 115.
[28]
Cohn, Ruby: Comment C’est: de quoi rire, The French
Review, Vol 35, No.6, May, 1962, pp.565-567.
[31] Ruby Cohn highlights the associations of
the two object, the sack and chord, with theft and punishment. In ancient Rome
it was the practice to place thieves in a sack which was then closed with a
chord, before depositing them in the
Tiber.http://www.expressio.fr/expressions/homme-individu-gens-de-sac-et-de-corde.php
[32] ‘je
suis un monster des solitudes’ CCp.18 –‘I
am a monster of solitudes’ HIS, p.8.Again, this way Beckett has of blending
the apparently autobiographic with the mythological – Knowlson notes that
around the time of CC’s composition
Beckett sometimes struggled with the amount of socialising that his newfound
fame as a highly successful and critically acclaimed author brought him. DTF, p.463.
[34] His English publisher, and friend, John
Calder gave a series of lectures in 2012 entitled Beckett and God in which he underlined the importance of the Bible,
and particularly the Old Testament, in Beckett’s work. Calder was at pains to
emphasise Beckett’s ‘deep immersion in Calvinistic theology’* which the author
received particularly at his time spent in Portora Royal School. Taken from
notes while attending John Calder’s lecture given at Dublin City University,
11/10/2012.
[36] Heidegger & Fink: Heraclitus Seminar, Translated by Charles H. Seibert, North Western
University, Elvanston, Illinois, 1979, p.5.
[37] Vico,
Giambattista: New Science, Translated
by David Marsh, Penguin Classics, London, 2001, p.153.
[38] Bair,
Deirdre: Samuel Beckett – A Biography,
Vintage, London, 1990, pp.554-555.
[39] Anthony Cordingley posits that l’ordre naturel which Beckett repeatedly
refers to in the text is in fact a reference to Aristotelian notions of grammar
which were carried on by the logicians and linguists at Port Royale, a claim
which he admittedly acknowledges is slightly lacking as the text is hardly
driven completely by such notions. And so, I postulate, as an alternative
source, Vico’s three ages of man which would perhaps encase more fully,
alongside Cordingley’s idea of French grammar, the ‘complete’ picture: in
dichotomy always becoming the whole. It is never a question, in Beckett, of
coming down on any one particular side or the other, but rather always looking
out for the two parts which make up the whole, hence the eternal continuum of
pseudo couples: Pim & Pam, Bim & Bom, Krim & Krim etc. This, of
course, is a wholly Heraclitean notion.
Cordingley, Anthony: Beckett and” l’ordre naturel”, The Universal
Grammar of Comment C’est/How It Is, All Sturm and No Drang, Beckett and
Romanticism: Beckett and Reading, 2006, Vol. 18, of Samuel Beckett
Today/Aujourd’Hui: Rodolpi, 2007, pp. 185-200.
[40] Nietzsche,
Friedrich: The Pre-Platonic Philosophers,
Translated from the German and Edited, with an new Introduction and Commentary,
by Greg Whitlock, Illinois University Press, Illinois, 2006, p.53.
[41] Baudelaire, Charles: Les Fleurs Du Mal, Garnier Flammarion,
Paris, 2006, p.61.‘Exiled on earth amid
the jeers of crowds, His movement impeded by his giant wings.’ O’ Connor, Ulick: The Kiss, New and Selected Poems and Translations, Salmon Poetry,
Cliffs of Moher, County Clare, 2006, p.71.
[42] ‘I’ve
been reading nothing but Rimbaud.’ Beckett writes in a letter to his friend
and fellow poet Thomas McGreavy, during his time lecturing at Trinity in
1931.Beckett, Samuel: The Letters of Samuel
Beckett 1929-1940, Edited by
Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 2009, p. 73.
[43] Beckett,
Samuel : Collected Poems in English and
French, Grove Press, New York, 1977, pp.92-105.
[44] Beckett,
Samuel: Disjecta, Grove Press, New
York, 1984, p.27.
[45] Vico,
Giambattista: New Science, Penguin
Books, London, 2001, p.148.
[46] Rimbaud,
Arthur: Complete Works Selected Letters,
Translation and Notes by Wallace Fowlie, Phoenix Books, University of Chicago,
Chicago & London, 1966, p.309.
[47] Beckett,
Samuel: CC.p.53.
[48] Beckett,
Samuel: HII.p.28.
[49] Dettmar,
Kevin: The Joyce that Beckett Built,
James Joyce Quarterly, Vol. 35/38,University of Tulsa, summer/fall, 1998,
p.616.
[51] Foucault,
Michel: The Archaeology of Knowledge,
Routledge Classics, London, 2006, p. 174.
[52] Dublin is an architectural jewel as
regards Georgian architecture, James Gandon’s Custom House and The Courthouse
being but two such magnificent examples of the style which Beckett, as a
Dubliner, would have been well familiar with, as indeed was Joyce. The point
being that growing up in a city which had already such a natural blending of
Classical, Palladian and 18th century styles could not but have some
kind of deeply subliminal impact on both writers. (note to support)
[53] Beckett,
Samuel: Disjecta, Edited by Ruby
Cohen, Grove Press, New York, 1984, p.169.
[56] Barnes,
Julian: Early Greek Philosophy,
Penguin Classics, London, 1987, p.50.
[57] Esposito,
Roberto: Pensiero vivento, Piccola
Biblioteca Einaudi, Torino, 2010, p.41.
[59] Badiou,
Alan: Dissymetries – On Beckett, Edited by Nina Power and
Alberto Toscano, Clinamen Press, Manchester, 2003.
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