Chronic Conditions: Beckett, Bergson and Samuel Johnson.

Ulrika Maude

doi:10.1007/s10912-015-9372-2

Abstract

This article analyses the work of the twentieth-century late modernist Samuel Beckett, in light of the turn-of-the-century anti-rationalist Henri Bergson (1859-1941) and the eighteenth-century neoclassicist Samuel Johnson (1709-1784). What unites these three very different thinkers is a concern over habitual, automatic and involuntary behavior, which in all three cases has a distinctly neurological dimension. Beckett’s writing explores the Bergsonian notion, informed by medicine and experimental psychology, of the limitations of agency, of “the deep-seated recalcitrance of matter,” and of the human as always already inflicted by the mechanical, a fact that is poignantly highlighted by the case of Samuel Johnson. Through his encounter with Johnson, Beckett registers a paradigm shift in the understanding of subjectivity. Whereas Bergson aims, throughout his career, to contest the mechanical, habitual and automatic that threaten to encrust themselves upon the living, in Beckett’s often uncannily Johnsonian writing, the habitual and the automatic become progressively more central, until in the late works, habit and mechanical behavior constitute a tenuous, fraught and primitive ontology, the residues of an agential self.

Highlights

This article analyses the work of the twentieth-century late modernist Samuel Beckett, in light of the turn-of-the-century anti-rationalist Henri Bergson (1859-1941) and the eighteenthcentury neoclassicist Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
Fashionable and intriguing did hysteria and neurological disorders prove around the turn of the century that they generated, besides a new performance style, a number of songs and literary works such as Guy de Maupassant’s short story, BLe Tic^ (BThe Spasm^) from 1884 or T
From 1936 to 1937, Beckett intensively researched the life of Samuel Johnson for a play he intended to write about the great eighteenth-century lexicographer