LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

are objects of irony for the author, who knows that the hope of purgation and escape is a delusion.

      Watt,¹ in this schema, serves as a parody of the Paradiso. Watt, traveling to Knott’s house and finally ascending to the vision of Knott after labors that train his will to quietude, resembles Dante in his ascent through purgatory and paradise to the vision of God. Like Dante’s God circled by nine orders of angels, Knott is always surrounded by his servants, ‘in tireless assiduity turning . . . eternally turning about Mr Knott in tireless love’ (Watt, pp. 61-62). Knott, however, is not Dante’s God, not the God that Mr Spiro and others talk about at the beginning of the book, the God who is traditionally supposed to be eternal and immutable. Mr Knott changes shape constantly. If he is a type of God at all, it is the phenomenological God, the changing image of God that is all men have to live with in Beckett’s universe. Watt is a man in quest of certainty, of knowledge of immutable truth. In Knott’s house he learns that there can be no absolute knowledge of any kind. But even after learning this, he still cannot help continuing to try to understand the world around him: ‘. . . he was for ever falling into this old error, this error of the old days when, lacerated with curiosity, in the midst of substance shadowy he stumbled’ (Watt, p. 227). Watt has learned that there is no absolute and no intelligible meaning in life, but, like all men, and like all Beckett’s characters, he can never completely free himself from the need to go on looking for them. It is this necessity to keep on and on making the same mistakes that makes the reality of life a hell.

      Paradise and purgatory are both delusions that Beckett’s earlier works examine ironically and dismiss. The reality underlying all of the novels is hell. The trilogy and How It Is are explorations of this reality. In Beckett’s work they occupy a position corresponding approximately to that of the Inferno in Dante’s. Hell in Christian tradition is supposed to be primarily the absence of God. In Watt, Beckett showed the emptiness of the idea of God. In the remaining novels he shows a total absence of God, an absence beyond anything that Dante could possibly have imagined. Dante’s damned may be deprived of the direct vision of God, but they still know Him indirectly, that is, they know that He exists, and this knowledge makes the universe and their place in it at least partially intelligible to them. The suffering may not be any less painful for their knowledge of its justice, but at least they are not, like Beckett’s characters, ‘lacerated with curiosity’ as to what it all means. The denizens of Beckett’s Inferno have not even the comfort of knowing they are damned. Moran, at the beginning of his quest, thinks he understands something of what life is all about, but Molloy, Malone, the Unnamable, and the narrator of How It Is are in utter confusion. They cannot even satisfy themselves with the atheist’s explanation that it is all meaningless. Just as they are compelled by an inexplicable inner necessity to keep moving across their bleak landscapes or through an infinity of mud, they are also compelled to keep trying to figure out an explanation for their fate. In More Pricks than Kicks and Murphy, insanity and death still seemed to the protagonists to offer means of escape from the necessity to go on thinking and trying to understand the unintelligible. Watt did not look for death, but he did go insane—his story is told by another inmate of the asylum—and insanity gave him no relief. The trilogy and How It Is rule out death in order to explore what man’s condition would be if neither escape of any kind nor hope of escape were possible. Purgatory could have an exit, but hell cannot.

      Cultural histories of the Western world have long interpreted Descartes as the thinker who marks the dividing point between the medieval and the modern world views. Although recent studies have shown both how dependent Descartes was on the philosophical concepts of the Middle Ages and how much more philosophically radical than Descartes were some of the scholastics themselves, William of Ockham and Nicholas of Autrecourt, for example, Descartes remains a convenient symbol of the breakup of the unitary world view of Aquinas and Dante. More than any previous thinker of the later Middle Ages or early Renaissance, Descartes stressed the metaphysical and epistemological problems involved in any attempt to connect the realm of spirit with the realm of matter. The composite of body and soul in a single substance that was described by the Thomistic system split apart for Descartes and his followers into a body and a soul, the connection between which was highly problematical. Some of Descartes’s followers, such as Malebranche and Geulincx, separated the two even more radically than he. Geulincx’s occasionalism interpreted spirit and matter as two parallel but totally unconnected systems. To explain how a person’s mental impressions of the physical world could correspond to its reality, Geulincx used the analogy of two clocks, one representing matter, the other spirit, both wound up and set by the master clockmaker to run perfectly synchronously. From the occasionalist point of view, there could be no connection between the mental impression of a flash, for example, and the physical reality of an explosion, other than that both took place simultaneously.

      Nevertheless, the occasionalists, by their assumption that God would make the two systems of matter and spirit parallel and synchronous, reveal their attachment to the old certainties. And Descartes did not wish to go even as far as they in breaking up the unity of man’s world and of his being. Although he maintained that the body and soul were distinct and independent of each other, he also believed, for no reason that he was ever able to describe adequately; that information about the realm of matter passed in some mysterious manner through the physical senses to the spiritual mind.² Since his philosophy could provide no explanation for this connection between body and soul, his reasons for continuing to believe in it were probably emotional.

      Beckett acquired a thorough knowledge of Descartes, both of his break with the past and of his ties to it, in the process of writing his Master’s thesis on Descartes for Trinity College. One of Beckett’s first published works, Whoroscope (1930), awarded a ten-pound prize for the best poem on the subject of time in a competition sponsored by Nancy Cunard, is a portrait of Descartes. It presents Descartes’s stream-of-consciousness as he waits for his morning omelette, which, Beckett says in his probably facetiously elaborate Waste Land – like notes to the poem, the philosopher liked ‘made of eggs hatched from eight to ten days.’ As he waits, thinking of the passage of time and how it will inevitably lead him to death—‘horoscope’ means ‘hour-watcher’—Descartes’s passing thoughts and comments reveal how attached he really is to the world view of the Middle Ages. Although he swears ‘by the brothers Boot’—who, according to Beckett’s note, ‘in 1640 refuted Aristotle in Dublin’—he curses Galileo as a ‘vile old Copernican lead-swinging son of a sutler’ for saying that the earth is in motion. On the subject of reconciling his dualism with the Church’s dogma of transubstantiation in the Eucharist, he insists that he believes wholeheartedly in transubstantiation and in Dante’s ‘great high bright rose,’ the mystical body of Christ as imaged in the last cantos of the Paradiso.

      Beckett makes numerous allusions to the ideas of Descartes and the occasionalists in his novels. In More Pricks than Kicks, Belacqua scoffs ‘at the idea of a sequitur from his body to his mind’ (p. 32). Murphy, more of a thinker than Belacqua, is fond of quoting ‘the beautiful Belgo-Latin of Arnold Geulincx’ to himself and has developed a fairly elaborate analysis of his mental life on the basis of Cartesian dualism:

      Murphy felt himself split in two, a body and a mind. They had intercourse apparently, otherwise he could not have known that they had anything in common. But he felt his mind to be bodytight and did not understand through what channel the intercourse was effected nor how the two experiences came to overlap [Murphy, p. 109].

      To Murphy, as to the others among Beckett’s characters who think in Cartesian terms,³ the appeal of Cartesian dualism is that it seems to account for the intractability of the physical world and to offer an alternative to life in it. Without exception, Beckett’s characters are physically tormented by their own decrepitude and by their inability to make life in any way physically comfortable for themselves. If the physical and mental realms of being can be interpreted as completely separate, then it would seem possible to escape from the frustration and pain of physical existence into the freedom of a purely mental existence. As the more lucid characters of the later works realize, however, this is an illusory hope.

      Beckett is not a Cartesian. His works are based on a belief in the fundamental disharmony between body and mind,

Скачать книгу