Torturer and Servant: Samuel Beckett'sHow It Is

Abstract

Hoy low It Is (Comment c'est) is a difficult and puzzling text which has elicited varied approaches from critics. Some commentators view the novel through the lens of philosophy, focusing, for example, on Beckett's relationship to Sartre, or Camus; the Beckett/Geulincx connection; or on the influence of Democritus of Abdera.1 Others concentrate on Beckett's use of The Inferno,2 or read the novel as an illustration of Beckettian aesthetics by drawing on his critical statements in Three Dialogues and in his essays on painters. These aestheticians underscore the vain compulsion to impose unity and meaning on human experience through art3 or see How It Is as a representation of the artist's struggle against, and submission to, suicide.4 The novel is also seen as the creation through torture of a social being.5 Nearer to my own reading, Frederik N. Smith describes Beckett's attempts to catch the flux of the writing process as it happens. The contest is between imagination (spontaneous creation) and revision. However, Smith does not go beyond his argument that the novel represents the genesis