6 - ‘The Proustian equation is never simple’: Samuel Beckett

Summary

Réels sans être actuels, idéaux sans être abstraits?

Marcel Proust, Le Temps retrouvé (1986: 263)

What a relief the Mont Ste. Victoire after all the anthropomorphised landscape … Cézanne seems to have been the first to see landscape & state it as material of a strictly peculiar order, incommensurable with all human expressions whatsoever. Atomistic landscape with no velleities of vitalism, landscape with personality à la rigueur, but personality in its own terms …

Samuel Beckett, letter to Thomas McGreevy, 8 September 1934 (Fehsenfeld and Overbeck 2009: 222)

What I feel he gets so well, dispassionately, not tragically like Watteau, is the heterogeneity of nature & the human denizens, the unalterable alienness of the 2 phenomena … God knows it doesn't take much sensitiveness to feel that in Ireland, a nature almost as inhumanly inorganic as a stage set. And perhaps that is the final quale of Jack Yeats's painting, a sense of the ultimate inorganism of everything. Watteau stressed it with busts & urns, his people are mineral in the end. A painting of pure inorganic juxtapositions, where nothing can be taken or given & there is no possibility of change or exchange.

Samuel Beckett, letter to Thomas McGreevy, 14 August 1937 (Fehsenfeld and Overbeck 2009: 540)

As with Gertrude Stein and Wallace Stevens, so it seems impossible to dissociate Samuel Beckett's work from abstraction. A common proposition is to see that work as an inexorable approach to abstraction. So, for Peter Boxall, Beckett's fiction moves from ‘the slightly bent realism of Dream and Murphy, through the increasingly abstract realms of Watt, the Nouvelles and the trilogy’; Tim Lawrence notes how this has long been seen as a matter of Beckett's prose style, moving ‘from relative plenitude to one of abstract minimalism’ (Boxall 2015: 39; Lawrence 2015: 57). Steven Connor reports that Beckett's oeuvre is ‘often said to have moved progressively away from the material world and its conditions, and to have withdrawn into various different kinds of subjectivism and abstraction’ (Connor 1988: 44). The association Connor identifies between subjectivism and abstraction recalls the role of abstraction in Georg Lukács's critique of an ideology of literary modernism, where the retreat into the monadological self is also a retreat away from ‘the material world’.