Abstract

As an enthusiastic reader of pre-socratic, Lucretius, Kant, Leibnitz, Spinoza, and Bergson (Murphy 1994), and a relentless parodist of Western tradition of philosophical idealism (Pilling 1992), young Beckett of 1931 Proust understands referential exteriority as an irreducible continuum in time and space (Beckett 1931, 41),1 and therefore champions an alternative model of symbolization. Following Schopenhauer's dictum that logical methods of grasping reality need to be rejected in favour of an aesthetic attitude of pietas ? the contemplation of world independently of principle of reason (Beckett 1931, 66) ? Beckett extols a transitory poetic language. This is a practice which intends to articulate referent (Locatelli 1990; Amiran 1993)2 and therefore is willing to double its ambiguity and ephemerality. In words of Three Dialogues, it is a writing obliged to express and, within a metaphysical perspective, doomed to fail because mimetic of fleeting, contradictory occurrences of life (Beckett 1984, 145). Beckett's profession of failure is nonetheless occasion of an important break with traditional representational system and ultimately an indication of success. As a practice which no longer seeks to reduce complexities of signification to totalizing order of meaning, it is diametrically opposed to logocentric use of language as metaphysical 'techne' (Trezise 1990, 3Iff.),3 and therefore comes to be situated outside early and late Modernism. To be more specific, since Beckettian literary space is kept in a constant state of overdetermination and regress, it clearly marks a departure from stability of sedentary symbolization informing epiphanic moments of Modernist narratives. These are reflected most notably in Proustian episodes of involuntary memory (Proust 1989, 178), and in aesthetics of Joyce's Stephen Daedalus, for whom improper art are kynetic and lack self-boundness (Joyce 1968, 205).4 Further, since this figuration is also historical, it displaces premises of artistic endeavour as a-temporal monuments in favour of that ontology of decline described by Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger in 1936 as auratic loss and memento mori; a poetic language which does not stand apart from ephemerality of life but emerges into existence and passes away in death (Benjamin 1968; Heidegger 1971). This is of course a crucial development which helps situate Beckett's points of divergence from

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