Choices: Beckett’s Way

Abstract

Non, je ne me suis jamais quitte, libre, voila, je ne sais pas ce que ca veut dire mais c'est le mot que j'entends employer, libre de quoi faire, de ne rien faire, de savoir, mais quoi, les lois de la conscience peut-etre, de ma conscience. Ne serait-on pas libre? A examiner. --Samuel Beckett, Molloy, 15-16, 42 What choices do we really have in life? Put another way: how does choice operate within determined constraints? And how does life become art? So asks Marcel and Samuel Beckett in his wake. In what follows, I look at an early, a middle, and a late work by Beckett in order to trace how Beckett rereads Proust, in both a specific and more diffuse sense: Beckett's Proust, Molloy, and, although it may not seem an obvious selection, Words and Music. The first is a direct work of criticism about Proust, second an indirect reading of certain Proustian themes: space, time, and identity; last is a collaborative work in which a composer plays an active interpretative role, in this case Morton Feldman, whose composition was inspired by Beckett's Proust. Beckett's Beckett wrote his book on in 1930 for Chatto and Windus, after he abandoned idea of writing a thesis at Ecole Normale Superieure on and James Joyce. (1) Like Proust, he was seeking out models of aesthetic and philosophical writing. The study looks to neither biographical nor literary sources and is prescient both for Beckett's later writing and for way it opens darker side, or at least less redemptive side, of thought for twentieth century. In this work, Beckett takes up large themes of time and habit, love and art, and question of will--what individual controls and chooses, and that with which he or she comes to grips. Taking a leaf from Arthur Schopenhauer, Beckett writes: Proust is that pure subject. He is almost exempt from impurity of will. He deplores his lack of will until he understands that will, utilitarian, a servant of intelligence and habit, is not a condition of artistic experience (Proust 69). Now for Beckett, holds together multiplicity of selves in time: Breathing is habit. Life is habit. Or rather life is a succession of habits, since individual is a succession of individuals.... Habit is generic term for countless treaties concluded between countless subjects that constitute individual and their countless correlative objects (8). Yet this cohesive force is not conducive to feeling or understanding life, or to creating anything new. Beckett focuses on pernicious devotion of habit that paralyses [...] attention, anesthetizing the of being: that is [for Beckett], free play of every faculty (9). He is attentive to the periods of transition that separate consecutive adaptations, perilous zones in life of individual, dangerous, precarious, painful, mysterious and fertile, when for a moment boredom of living is replaced by of being (8). Transition then evokes suffering and anxiety for dying and jealous (think of changes in space, bedrooms, and time, different periods of life that novel's hero seeks to retrieve, ravages of aging or obsessive uncertainty associated with love) (11). If, as Beckett writes, characters are victims of time, then voluntary memory provides no control (4). Proust's Discourse on Method can be discerned, for Beckett, in intermittencies of heart--the hero's delayed realization of his grandmother's death prime example. Recovery of her presence in his memory comes with realization of an intolerable contradiction it happens only at moment of irremediable obliteration (28). So the will to live, will not to suffer that permits, relieves him of self-flagellation--the insistent memory of cruelties to one who is (in this case, his grandmother) because dead are only dead in so far as they continue to exist in heart of survivor (29). …