{"title":"From the Cradle to the Cave: A Comedy of Ethics from Plato to Christian Asceticism (via Rembrandt)","authors":"A. Cordingley","doi":"10.3366/EDINBURGH/9781474440608.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/EDINBURGH/9781474440608.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"The metaphysical themes explored in previous chapters are amplified when Beckett is shown to engage explicitly with the ethics of Plato and Aristotle, as well as Greek and Roman Stoics. This chapter delves deep into Beckett’s comedy of ethics, examining his exploitation of Socratic method and ancient philosophies of education or paideia, morality and “natural order” to frame the journey of his “I” and the “I”’s recitation of his narrative as ethical acts. Beckett’s “I” contrasts these ideas with modes of Christian asceticism, filtering his conception of his own “flight into Egypt” through images in his mind that derive from the painting of religious motifs in Rembrandt, Elsheimer and others. Beckett’s ironic regard for his “I” is considered in terms of his ethics of laughter and his philosophically inflected notion of the risus purus (the laughter that laughs at itself), which emerges as a driving force in the novel’s ethical comedy.","PeriodicalId":245579,"journal":{"name":"Samuel Beckett's How It Is","volume":"1998 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128227032","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Spinoza, Leibniz or a World ‘less exquisitely organized’","authors":"A. Cordingley","doi":"10.3366/EDINBURGH/9781474440608.003.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/EDINBURGH/9781474440608.003.0008","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter concludes the investigation by detailing the way that Beckett’s narrator/narrator weighs up a philosophy of imminence (Spinoza) against a philosophy of transcendence (Leibniz). A new reading of Beckett’s relationship to these preeminent Rationalists is sustained through an examination of the Comment c’est notebooks and Beckett’s “Philosophy Notes”, and other works, such as, Endgame. A deep affinity is discovered between Beckett’s work and Spinoza’s uncompromising attack on the Judeo-Christian transcendentalism and anthropomorphism, which complicates the interpretation of Beckett’s most Leibnizian passages in the third and final Part of How It Is, when Beckett’s “I” attempts unsuccessfully to give a Rationalist account of his own cosmology. The dialectic Beckett fashions between Spinoza Leibniz amplifies the wide range of philosophical concerns detailed over the preceding chapters of this book. His novel use of Leibniz’s mathematics, in particular the calculus of infinitesimals, is revealed as source of a number of philosophical images that interact with other philosophical tropes to interrogate the nature of reality and the divine, and the claim to represent with reason the relationships between each. Mathematics emerges, in Beckett’s text, as a symbolic language transformed into an original, poetic order that expresses the complex and often paradoxical aesthetic questions of authorship, character and textuality.","PeriodicalId":245579,"journal":{"name":"Samuel Beckett's How It Is","volume":"56 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131644655","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Physical Cosmos: Aristotelian Dialectics","authors":"A. Cordingley","doi":"10.3366/EDINBURGH/9781474440608.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/EDINBURGH/9781474440608.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores the impact of the dialectics of the Ancient world after Plato upon Beckett’s French novels and the peculiar set of relations between characters and their physical environment in How It Is. It accounts for the presence of Aristotelian ideas of cosmic order, syllogism, space and time. Beckett’s study of formal logic as a student at Trinity College, Dublin and his private study of philosophy in 1932 is examined in this light; particularly his “Philosophy Notes,” along with further sources for his knowledge. The Aristotelian world view of his “I” is shown to be confronted with a set of relations resembling those of the Ancient Greek Stoics. The materiality of spatio-temporal relations in How It Is and the metaphysical coordinates between the “I”, its cosmos and any transcendent other are interrogated. The dialectic between Aristotelian and Stoic physics and metaphysics in How It Is emerges as a conceptual framework for exploring many of the novel’s contradictions, as well as the many confusions and digressions of its narrator/narrated. Beckett’s creative transformation of this ancient dialectic is shown, furthermore, to lead him to formal innovations, such as the novel’s continuous present tense and its complex narrative structure.","PeriodicalId":245579,"journal":{"name":"Samuel Beckett's How It Is","volume":"96 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115696198","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Mystic Paths, Inward Turns","authors":"A. Cordingley","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474440608.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474440608.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter expands upon the Christian themes introduced in the previous chapter. It identifies intertextual discourse with the Psalms, Early Church Fathers, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine and certain neo-Platonists. It explores the importance of desert mysticism and notions of ascesis within the novel, and links this with multiple allusions to the inward turn or practised indifference of seventeenth-century Rationalists, notably Malebranche and Geulincx, and Quietists such as Fénelon, or the philosophy of Spinoza. How It Is is then argued to be Beckett’s most sustained engagement with Geulingian ethics. When Beckett draws on mysticism, Rationalism, Occasionalism and the conceptualisation of freewill in each, he is shown to thematize artistic originality and the agency of narrative voice, its relationship to the authorial voice.","PeriodicalId":245579,"journal":{"name":"Samuel Beckett's How It Is","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133924453","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Pascal’s Miraculous Tongue","authors":"A. Cordingley","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474440608.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474440608.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter locates allusions to the works and life of Blaise Pascal from The Unnamable to How It Is. It explores the relationship Beckett forges between literary allusions and the contents of memory when relating Pascal’s mysticism to the notion of “involuntary memory” in Marcel Proust’s writing. Debates in the preceding chapters come to a head in the figure of Pascal, and Beckett’s comic attitude towards his narrator/narrated’s habit of filtering his journey through tropes of Cartesian rationalism, reasoned theology or arational mysticism becomes evident when the “I” emulates or draws from colourful and absurd episodes of Pascal’s life. The nineteenth-century literary historian and novelist Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve is considered as a potential mediator between Pascal and Proust in Beckett’s thinking. Yet Beckett is shown to neutralize the referential content of his Pascalian and Proustian allusions over the course of his manuscript revisions, when he is shown to move away from directly allusive to abstracted and poetic language, attempting to bring an “ignorant” perspective to his past learning. The question of how to find an authentic, original voice out of past experience emerges, finally, as central to the meaning of these novels and Beckett’s creative process.","PeriodicalId":245579,"journal":{"name":"Samuel Beckett's How It Is","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128312023","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Pythagorean Mysticism/Democritean Wisdom","authors":"A. Cordingley","doi":"10.3366/EDINBURGH/9781474440608.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/EDINBURGH/9781474440608.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter elucidates the dialectic between Pythagorean-Platonic and Democritean ideas latent in the text. It measures the importance of Beckett’s perception of philosophy gained through his study of Wilhelm Windelband’s A History of Philosophy. Unearthing Beckett’s reaction to the nineteenth-century Kantian’s grand narrative of the progress of reason, this chapter maps out the poetics of appropriation that marks Beckett's quintessentially late modernist aesthetics. In no way can Beckett’s poetics edify the Tradition (à la Pound or Eliot), but neither can it simply deny, subvert, or pastiche it. To ask whether or not Beckett escapes into nihilism, to wonder if he finds a philosophically satisfactory solution to his rejection of a faith in reason, or to look for his synthesis of the Ancient dialectic he entertains is in each case to miss the point. Beckett's use of allusive discourse is demonstrated to be a vector through which he explores the mechanisms of listening and memory, creativity and imagination. This chapter therefore begins this book’s investigation of Beckett’s use of philosophy that defines his aesthetics as a limit point of modernism.","PeriodicalId":245579,"journal":{"name":"Samuel Beckett's How It Is","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121261498","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Poetics of Translation: Dante, Goethe and the Paideia","authors":"A. Cordingley","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474440608.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474440608.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores Beckett’s polyphonic, multilingual intertextuality. It begins by examining the role of Dante’s Divina\u0000 Commedia in the composition of Comment c’est and challenging the received idea that Dante’s work is the ur-text underwriting Beckett’s novel. It charts when Dantean images enter the work’s genesis and how they are volatilized when rendered in the French of Comment c’est and the English of How It Is. Beckett is shown to inscribe into his Dantean images and echoes, allusions to other texts in the French and English traditions. A new theory of Beckett’s multilingual authorship is offered, which draws on his use of Gœthe, the Bildungsroman and his acute attention to dynamics of pedagogical transfer and paideia.","PeriodicalId":245579,"journal":{"name":"Samuel Beckett's How It Is","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128090242","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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