Trapped in Thought: A Study of the Beckettian Mentality (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Trapped in Thought: A Study of the Beckettian Mentality Amber N. Pagel Trapped in Thought: A Study of the Beckettian Mentality by Eric P. Levy, pp. 248. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2007. $24.95. Eric Levy’s Trapped in Thought: A Study of the Beckettian Mentality not only provides an analysis of Samuel Beckett’s works, but also offers an examination of Beckettian mimesis as it relates to Thomistic, Platonic, and Cartesian philosophies. Resisting the view of Beckettian works as exercises of absurdity, Levy uncovers the philosophical bases upon and against which he asserts Beckett’s works are formulated. Levy claims a “Platonic inheritance in Beckettian mimesis” which he investigates through the language of philosophy and a “dual method of analysis”: he undertakes “thematic interrogation” from various perspectives and the “exegesis of specific texts.” The primary works to which Levy devotes this analysis include Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and Krapp’s Last Tape. Levy commences with an investigation of the mimeses of pain, seeing nothing, and absence to construct a thematic foundation upon which to extend his philosophical examination of the Beckettian mentality. According to Levy, the “consistent aim in Beckettian mimesis is to evacuate experience of any content but conviction in the excruciating pain of enduring it.” This obsession with pain is a mode of awareness of deprivation or lack, an abstract emptiness. Levy posits the abstract world of Beckett as the “equivalent of the Platonic world of Pure Ideas or Forms.” As pain intensifies, it abstracts suffering, Levy explains; and to feel such pain that is abstracted from self is to lose identity. Levy clarifies how the external nothingness seen in Beckettian mimesis is a reflection of an internal void, and identifying with this reflection is to lose individuality, reducing or abstracting individual identity to a universality. The “awareness of unawareness” or of absence, Levy asserts, is the consequence of repetitive introspection of pain and emptiness, an evacuation of all content, including moral responsibility. In examining absence, Levy claims the “moral imperative in Beckettian mimesis entails the compulsion to empty,” [End Page 155] resulting in absence as good—a reversal that demonstrates the irrelevance of logic in the Beckettian universe. In chapters four through six, Levy investigates the trilogy of Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable through a philosophical lens, focusing on the Beckettian state of inexistence and the disintegration of rational thinking. Levy situates his analyses as extensions of, and more often in opposition to, current theoretical thought. Levy’s reexamination of Beckett’s philosophical influences demonstrates a teleological difference in the Christian-humanist tradition and Beckett’s fiction, a disintegration of Aristotelian telos into purposelessness, directionless movement, repetitious compulsion, and circularity. The purposelessness of Beckettian mimesis reveals an irrationality of deactualization, of an entelechy which is not the actuality of individual being, but of a nonbeing. In Malone’s narration of his decline toward death, he claims, Beckett’s mimetic aim is to use particular experiences to reveal transcendentals of the Beckettian mentality. Building on Paul Ricoeur and Edmund Husserl’s concept of transcendentals, Levy examines how the Beckettian universe is evacuated or drained of structure and order. Levy amends Aquinas’ doctrine of kenosis, or evacuation, so that in Beckettian art, the voice evacuates an “object of consciousness from the consciousness” where it in exists, thereby disassociating subject and object positions. Chapter six, “The Unnamable: The Metaphysics of Beckettian Introspection,” further reduces selfhood by fabricating a universal in place of individual identity. Levy explains that to accomplish this, Beckett “disintegrates the notions of identity” in “the Aristotelian, Platonic, and especially the Cartesian metaphysical systems.” The Cartesian cogito is “unavailable” for the Unnamable, for thinking increases doubt of his selfhood, and inquiries only perplex him, separating cogito from cogitatum. Both Waiting for Godot and Endgame demonstrate purposeless waiting and repetitive, meaningless processes which reveal Thomistic acedia, a sloth of nothingness that affects the mind with crippling sorrow. Levy points out that this is a consequence, as St. Augustine wrote, of “separating will from reason.” The purposelessness of Beckettian inexistence likewise achieves a “false innocence” which results in “deferral of decision,” for Beckettian inexistence negates moral responsibility. To further substantiate his...