Reading Godot - Lois Gordon PDF

LOIS GORDON
Reading Godot
YA L E U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S
N E W H AV E N A N D L O N D O N
Copyright 2002 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be
reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that
copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by
reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.
Designed by Rebecca Gibb. Set in Scala type by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Printed in
the United States of America by Vail-Ballou Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gordon, Lois G.
Reading Godot / Lois G. Gordon.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 0-300-09286-5 (alk. paper)
1. Beckett, Samuel, 19061989. En attendant Godot. I. Title.
pq2603.e378 e644 2002
842%.914dc21
2001006565
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the
Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library
Resources.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
acknowledgments
ix
introduction The Form of Madness: A Sensible Mess

ONE
The First Forty Years: Origins of a Vision and Form
TWO
Waiting for Godot: The Existential Dimension
THREE
The Dream as a Manifestation of Unconscious Language

and Emotion: The Conglomerative Eect 70
FOUR
The Conglomerative Voice: Cain and Abel
FIVE
The Language of Dreams: The Anatomy of the

Conglomerative Eect 97
86
19
55
SIX
The key word is . . . perhaps
SEVEN
Staging the Conglomerative Eect
EIGHT
Crystallization of a Vision and Form

notes
171
selected bibliography
index
208
199
112
125
144
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Acknowledging those who have helped me with my work on Samuel

Beckett takes me back to graduate school when the Swift scholar
Ricardo Quintana encouraged me to study Beckett. It is impressive, I
think, that virtually everyone who had published on Beckett in those
days still remains in the pantheon of Becketts most distinguished
critics: Ruby Cohn, Martin Esslin, Raymond Federman, John
Fletcher, and Hugh Kenner. After Beckett won the Nobel Prize, the
scholarship ourished. The abundance of talented people studying
the man and his work, then and now, remains imposing. I hope my
notes and bibliography will serve as an acknowledgment of my respect for and gratitude to the many thoughtful scholars who have
continued the lively Beckett dialogue over the years.
I owe special mention to a few whose work or advice has been
particularly useful in this book. Martha Fehsenfeld and Dougald
McMillan provided an excellent commentary on Becketts Regiebuch
in Beckett in the Theatre. Their work on Waiting for Godot was based,
in part, on the production notebooks in the Beckett Archive at the

University of Reading, founded by James Knowlson. Knowlsons
publication of the Waiting for Godot notebooks, the rst volume in
his The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett series, was also immensely useful. Lois Oppenheims Directing Beckett, a series of interviews with and essays by Becketts directors, was a vital and provocative resource. Finally, Tom Bishop gave me generous access at New
York University to the videos of the Schiller-Theater and San Quentin Theater Workshop productions of Waiting for Godot. Rick Clucheys recollection of his work with Beckett was inspirational. The
illustrations on pages 13234 are courtesy of Martha Fehsenfeld.
It is my good fortune to have friends and colleagues who oered
invaluable support and conversation, many of whose remarks about
Beckett have remained with me over the years: Alec Reid, William
York Tindall, Mel Friedman, Warren G. French, Laurence Wiley,
Gottfried Bttner, Bernard Dick, Pauline Flanagan, Xerxes Mehta,
Thomas Cousineau, Robert Levine, Ilene Engelmayer, Charlotte
London, Marvin Rechter, and Barbara Deblat. I remain deeply grateful to my librarian-friends Eileen McIlvain, Judy Katz, and Laila
Rogers.
Once again I acknowledge the talented people at Yale University
Press, whose professionalism at every stage of production has been
exemplary. Two people require special mention: Lawrence Kenney,
for his highly insightful and meticulous manuscript editing, and
Jonathan Brent, who even as executive editor of the press, remains
the authors ideal friend.
Last but certainly not least I want to thank my husband, Alan, and
my son, Robert, whose encouragement and suggestions were invaluable.
INTRODUCTION
The Form of Madness: A Sensible Mess
One cannot speak anymore of being, one must speak only of

the mess. When Heidegger and Sartre speak of a contrast
between being and existence, they may be right. I dont know,
but their language is too philosophical for me. I am not a
philosopher. One can only speak of what is in front of him, and
that now is simply the mess. . . . [It] invades our experience at
every moment. It is there and it must be allowed [into art]. . . .
What I am saying does not mean that there will henceforth be
no form in art. It only means that there will be a new form and
that this form will be of such a type that it admits the chaos and
does not try to say that the chaos is really something else. The
form and the chaos remain separate. . . . That is why the form
itself becomes a preoccupation, because it exists as a problem
separate from the material it accommodates. To nd a form
that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.
Samuel Beckett
In the premodern era, religion explained both human nature and

the human condition. By the end of World War II, philosophy and
psychology had not so much destroyed the gospel as rewritten it in
secular language. Freudianism and existentialism were exciting new
introduction
paradigms of Western thought, and although their inuence has

declined, they provided the intellectual framework for many of the
twentieth centurys greatest artists, including Samuel Beckett.
Ironically, the outcome of the Freudian revolution in understanding human psychology was a view of the species a medieval monk
would have found congenial. In the gospel according to Freud, humans beings are creatures instinctually given to lust, murder, and
cannibalism. Cultural institutions, including religion, Freud believed, are the species forlorn eorts at restraining these biologically
inborn impulses. For the monk, God was, of course, both the architect and redeemer of the shortcomings of human nature.
Even the prescriptions of classical psychoanalysis bear a striking
similarity to the medieval sacraments, for here again the guilty dare
not face their accuser. They lie down and stare at ceilings (instead of
sitting in dark boxes) in the confession of their sin, and they direct
their hope for salvation toward analysts (instead of God and his
representatives). In both these seemingly distinctive rituals of expiation, humanity is presumed to be evil.
The existentialists proposed a dierent vision but one that also has
its counterpart in the medieval experience. Here, the concept of the
human situation, rather than human nature, would have been congenial to the medieval mind. Existentialists depict the anguish and
loneliness of facing the void; they describe the emotional despair of
dealing with the absence of a felt or veriable moral order. So, too, in
the Varieties of Religious Experience, William James describes how, at
the height of the medieval synthesis, the fourteenth-century mystic
struggled with a despairing sense of separation from God.
Estragons declaration We were all born mad in Waiting for
Godot may well be understood in both psychological and existential
terms. This may be a modern version of original sin, for madness,
many believe, is inherent in human nature. It is not a qualitatively
dierent state from sanity, but rather the condition in which the
introduction
ubiquitous forces of unreason break the fragile veneer of reason and

burst into consciousness and bizarre, dereistic behavior. In sanity,
these forces warp the facade, but reason manages to hold, except in
dreams, slips of the tongue, and socially acceptable, overtly coherent,
and often transparently rationalized forms of instinctual expression,
like war and neurosis.
According to classical psychoanalysis, the infant is pure instinct, a
creature of rage, lust, and narcissism, and the adult retains the infant
as an eternal hidden engine operative beneath the cover of repression. The clinically mad by denition can no longer subdue that part
of self. Repression, in other words, can no longer contain the repressed. Madness, as a universal human dimension, is thus a matter
of form rather than content, a question of the balance of inner forces
rather than their substance. It is the deepest inner experience of
Everyone.
Dierences between Freudianism and existentialism are numerous and obvious. In the main, however, like typical religious adherents, Freudians believe in an innate disposition, in human nature, while existentialists are primarily concerned with the human
situation or human condition. They believe, in Sartres familiar
words, in existence rather than essence. Yet, while they do not hold
that we are born with any predisposed moral or psychological nature, they assert that we are born to a condition, that is, into a world,
that necessitates inevitable loneliness and anxiety. The absence of a
veriable order or Ordererwith language, intellect, and reason incapable of validating realityimpels a psychic dislocation as much as
an intellectual bewilderment. In Becketts terms, one feels one cant
go on, yet one must go on. One requires purpose in a purposeless
universe, identity in an estranged mind/body coupling. Of this, as
well as of the intricate conicts within the self, Beckett writes in
Waiting for Godot, Lets go. (They do not move.).
Ultimately, for both Freudians and existentialists, the natural
introduction
state would seem to be one of alienation and disaection, where

madness is either ones inborn nature or the entirely irrational nature of the universe. In the end, folly, to use one of Becketts last
words, would seem to be the most reasonable, normal, and appropriate description of the natural but futile striving to understand the
world or self. In what is the word, Becketts last poem, its title
echoing In the beginning was the Word, Beckett begins,
folly
folly for to
for to
what is the word
folly from this
all this
folly from all this
given
folly given all this
seeing
folly seeing all this
this
what is the word
this this
this this here
all this this here
folly given all this
The following lines are folly for to need to seem to glimpse /
what where and Beckett continues, afaint afar away over there
what. . . . The commitment to life, to this this here, and the need
to glimpse the seen and afar away can only be intimated as
follya gentler word than madness but a renement, all the
same, of his earlier description in the above epigraph of the mess.
introduction
Folly would also admit of the humor or self-mockery Beckett generously aords his most humble gures (and their witnesses, the
audience, his readers) in their daily, heroic eorts at survival.
It was perhaps the widespread awareness of this mess or folly that
contributed to the breakdown of traditional form in the several arts
during the twentieth century. In music, initial assaults on form,
dissonance, and diatonic music progressed to electronic cacophony
and the randomness of the aleatory. In art, Cubist planes, Dada,
and Surrealism led not just to the collage of commercial remnants
heaped into pop art but also to the various forms of abstract and
geometric expressionism, as well as the constructs designed through
electronic media juxtaposed with fragments of traditional art forms.
Arbitrariness, unreason, and madnessthat is, human nature and
the human conditiondemanded expression, from Jackson Pollocks drip paintings (which display the unconscious in action)
to Jasper Johns ags and maps (which question the meaning and
function of the most ordinary icons of the everyday environment)
and Ann Hamiltons cerebral/sensory installations that amass various materials encoded with personal meaning. The key to arts
meaning or to the meaning of anything, for that matter, as Harold
Pinter understated it in the 1960s, is that verication remains impossible. At best, art sets two nonreferential mirrors into perpetual
interaction.
In literature, the presence of the mess has been clear, from the
use of stream of consciousness to explore the depths and intricacies
of subjectivity, exemplied so boldly in James Joyce, to the work of
more traditional prose stylists such as Saul Bellow, who portray life
as an essentially deranged and deranging experience, suggesting
that madness is an apt description of the human condition. The
antihero, the individual no longer able to triumph in a moral sphere,
has become the inevitable ospring of both Freudianism and existentialism: if ones instinctual nature mocks all eorts at nobility
introduction
and if cosmic absurdity mocks all pretenses to moral certainty, then

heroism can be only the rationalized product of self-deception or
self-aggrandizement.
In the 1950s and 1960s, several highly regarded novels written in
the picaresque formula, like The Adventures of Augie March, Catch-22,
and V, resolved (or ignored) these philosophical and psychological
issues by isolating the lusty, self-contained hero who, aware of both
instinct and absurdity, set out to gratify the former while denying the
latter. John Barth, Jorge Luis Borges, and Gabriel Garca Mrquez
confronted these weighty matters and juggled the simultaneous
need for and futility of personal choice against both the purposive
and fantastic inner and outer worlds. By the late 1960s and 1970s,
the already extended boundaries of the traditional arts were pushed
to new limits, as the postmoderns self-consciously obscured the line
between author and audience and between objectivity and subjectivity. Writers like Robert Coover and Donald Barthelme sought to
dene the unconscious patterns the mind imposes on its various
ordering systems, the way myths and language take shape from the
struggle between logic, instinct, and the urge to communicate the
incommunicable. Readers of these dicult new forms, like audiences of total theater, environmental and kinetic artand any variety
of happeningwere asked to join in the creation of a kind of
performance art, to partake of what John Cage had called the Yesand-No total aesthetic experience. Alongside these new forms, literary criticism from hermeneutics to deconstruction made its bid to
replace art as the mirror of nature. Writers of the 1980s and 1990s
like Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace continued the trend of the
metactionists and postmoderns. Others, such as Toni Morrison
and Richard Ford, incorporated new poetic trends in their evocation
of character and plot as they retained concrete situations of social
and moral peril.
Throughout, the theater remained a remarkably fertile arena in
which to explore and reect the concerns with (1) the multiple com-
introduction
ponents of self, (2) language as a means of constructing reality, and

(3) the issue of moral survival in a contingent universe. In the 1940s
and early 1950s, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams pursued traditional drama, and Sartre and Camus focused on existential matters.
Other midcentury playwrights, however, such as Eugne Ionesco,
Harold Pinter, Edward Albee, and, among the earliest, Samuel Beckettpractitioners of the then-labeled Theatre of the Absurdfurther
explored Camus and Sartres themes, but they incorporated into
their art the emotional ramications of the existential plight. Furthermore, they rendered these in the very language of the emotional
life: of unconscious as well as conscious thought functioning. If
rational, conscious discourse could be recorded, so could unconscious thought, as intuited by the artist and as recorded through
psychoanalytic research and dream analysis. Beckett was at the forefront of this new dramatic rhetoric, having read Freud, worked with
the Verticalists and Surrealists in Paris during the 1920s, undergone
psychoanalysis in London in the 1930s, and, perhaps most important, having ardently befriended James Joyce, at work on Finnegans
Wake. Beckett was also closely associated with a number of painters
outside the Surrealist circle, including Bram van Velde and Jack B.
Yeats, who, in their own work, were exploring the various levels of
mind functioning.
Experimental eorts to portray the psyche were, of course, not
unique. Strindberg, for example, had progressed from naturalism to
dream techniques, as he displayed the power and chaos of the emotional life. But he never tried to articulate the specic vocabulary
of unconscious experience. Pirandello had visualized the illusions
of reality that camouage deeper truths of murder, lust, and greed,
but he too stopped short of holding the mirror up to unconscious
thought patternings. And although their dramas failed, Surrealists
like Roger Vitrac, Raymond Roussel, Robert Desnos, and Jean Cocteau attempted an art that bypassed logic in order to concretely render the unconscious, but they ignored the simultaneous operation of
introduction
conscious and unconscious thinking.

One of the seminal works of the avant-garde was Ubu Roi, Alfred
Jarrys portrait of a protagonist both devoid of moral qualms and a
madman. Ubu was the personication of infantile rage and lust,
human nature in its rawest form, as well as a man who, aware of the
ultimate meaninglessness of life, chose evil over righteousness as
the cornerstone of his being. Jarrys devoted advocate Antonin Artaud went so far as to envision a theater based on the ritual expression of aggression, on the very automatism of the liberated unconscious. For Artaud, traditional drama was a cover-up for authentic,
underlying emotion, and unless form was altered entirely and emotion given total outlet, human experience could not be fully dramatized. Even before Artaud and Jarry, Mallarm and the other French
Symbolists who had fascinated Beckett during his Trinity College
years conceived of a theater that would suspend intellectual appeal
by staging metaphors of the dream state.
This kind of experimentation found its fruition in Becketts
uniquely poetic and seemingly elusive forms. Beckett went beyond
surreal and expressionistic images and beyond rational dialogue,
beyond any art form to date, in order to portray contingency and the
absurd, operative both within and without: within the individual
psyche and without, in the individuals external, cosmic environment. From his earliest works in the journal transition, such as Sedendo and Quiescendo, Beckett incorporated the language of the
inner, irrational life, alongside the language of philosophical investigation. In his greatest work, he became the spokesperson of the
postwar age, and his Waiting for Godot took its place beside The Waste
Land and Ulysses as the quintessential expression of the twentiethcentury zeitgeist.
Beckett had himself been witness to the extremes of human nobility and degradation. Although raised in an auent community
and educated in elite schools and later surrounded by the greatest
artists of his time, Beckett bore witness to a world of murder and
introduction
cannibalism, in Freuds terms. From his childhood in Dublin during the Easter Uprising of 1916 and World War I, through his experiences in London during the depths of the Depression, until World
War II, when he was a Resistance ghter, Beckett had rsthand
evidence of the underside of humanity: of mental and physical illness, of selshness and opportunism in the guise of benevolence,
and, of course, of the indescribable barbarity humans inict upon
one another. If his study of literature, philosophy, and religion, and
their speculations about human nature, were at best a conrmation
of the terrible life experiences he faced from childhood until the end
of the war, then his personal relationshipsnot the least of which
were the close family ties he cherished until his deathgave him
a contrasting view of human nature. Becketts friendships with a
number of exceptionally generous and idealistic people, all defenders of the disenfranchised and devotees of what one called the trinity of the true, the good, and the beautiful, reinforced in him the
moral imperative that acts of kindness and altruism may transcend
lifes travails. Such was the life that shaped the man who, after World
War II, began his personal siege and wrote some of the greatest
work of the twentieth century.
The American reception of Godot, in 1953, one of bewilderment and
frustration, was not unlike its earlier receptions in Paris and London
and was only an intimation of the confusion and frequent anger
Becketts subsequent work would evoke. Audiences accustomed to
the naturalistic work of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams frequently agreed with reviews that read the thing is simply an exercise in logorrhea; the play is the work of a man who prefers
puzzles to people; Becketts characters just stand there with Existentialism on their faces. Yet despite Godot s cancellation in Washington, Boston, and Philadelphia, Groves paperback printing of ve
thousand copies sold out before its ocial publication date, and
Beckett soon found his home in the newly refurbished environs of
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introduction
O Broadway. The undisputed realization of a major new dramatic

style emerged within academe; the quest for clarication began,
and Becketts concern with the human condition elicited most attention. The plays were dened in virtually every category of thought
as Christian, Marxist, existential, gnostic, mythic, parodic, ironic,
Jungianand the range of Becketts comic inventiveness, from the
vaudevillian to the scatological, the fantastic to the grotesque, was
similarly investigated.
Some critics sought an entirely new terminology. Many of the
earliest studies examined Becketts literary and philosophical antecedents or focused on his heroes: they were Cartesian questers deprived of the certainty of I am while continuously in search of it;
they were preoccupied with the verication of self and reality despite
the limitations of logic and language. In keeping with the styles of
postmodern analysis and using the language of structuralism, deconstruction, and reader-response criticism, scholars then reacted to
Becketts handling of language, to his semantic and syntactic de- and
reconstructions and rearrangements, as examples of the (ctive) recreation of the devalued I. Beckett was placed in the line of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Saussure, and Derrida: if the limitations of his
language were the limitations of his world, the universe was necessarily beyond cognition. The politics of silence became another fertile area of critical inquiry. Beckett criticism scoured a vast terrain of
interesting issues.
As Becketts landscapes and language became increasingly reduced, his texts and their many revisions were further analyzed as
conduits to pure being or personal revelation. His last plays were
taken beyond metactional and self-reexive theorizing, with the result that stagecraftlight, music, or, for example, a character reading
to a character reading to yet another characterbecame the focus
of epistemological and aesthetic issues. The plays were viewed as
poems or musical inventions, with production, once again, the key
to meaning. For some, through the purity of his forms, Beckett had
introduction
11
reached the ambivalence of the Sublime. He had achieved the silence, or the abyss, . . . the metaphysical or spiritual reality of existence at last exposed, beyond further illusion. He had transcended
gnosticism in an assertion of human freedom, turning Schopenhauers fragmentation and Will into Apollonian wholeness. He had
achieved a kind of mystical or religious state of mind in transforming ctional space, the imaginary and the silent, into a magical place
of closure.
In most of these commentaries, Beckett remained essentially the
philosopher: his work was read as the persistent attempt to grapple
with the unknowable. Whether focusing on reduced or restructured
plot, character, and language, on the various forms of parody or
classical inuence, on an utterly pared down yet poetic language or
geometrically designed stagecraft, or on the postmodern Sublime
analyses most frequently turned to philosophical matters, to issues
regarding the human condition. Beckett was described as the author
of a meticulously designed existential language of uncertainty that
served as a vehicle for personal mythmaking or as an intimation or
unveiling of chaos or silence. His poetry may have been unspeakably
beautiful, but it stood as a testimony of human industry in the face of
terror.
Becketts audiences, from the inmates at San Quentin and the
children of Appalachia to academias more sophisticated theatergoers, responded to his innovative tragicomedy in new ways. Here
was, to be sure, the tragedy of humanity at the mercy of random,
gratuitously kind or brutal inner and outer forces. But here was, as
well, the comedy of humanitys repetitive, often ridiculous, acts of
accommodation to the mess and to the personal neediness of others.
Becketts images of human persistence, along with his characters
repeated self-mockery as playthings in a world of cosmic emptiness,
were irresistible.
As the subject of critical analysis, Beckett poses a dicult problem. He has created, to be sure, a unique dramatic and ctional
12
introduction
idiom, and his innovative staging and linguistic arrangements give

striking new denition to traditional genres. At the same time, Becketts academic background and what appears to be the metaphysical
preoccupation of his characters have made philosophical interpretation inevitable. Throughout his life, however, Beckett warned that he
was not a philosopher; as his narrators frequently assert, Im a
big talking ball, talking about things that do not exist, or that exist
perhaps, impossible to know, beside the point; and Where now?
When now? Who now? Unquestioning. I, say I.
While the body of Beckett criticism has been of immeasurable
assistance in explaining the work, it has not dealt adequately with the
psychological depths of his characters, with their emotional world
with Becketts vision of human nature. Becketts insistence upon his
failure to know, like his insistence that he is not a philosopher,
may forewarn the critic as to the limits of philosophical commentary
and perhaps provide a meaningful clue to this other vital aspect of
his work.
What remains to be examined is that core or foundation that
sustains each works organic unity and, I believe, generates both its
universal appeal and subsequent mystery and depth. I refer to that
level of design akin to what Aristotle called soul, and others from
Aquinas to Joyce called integrity, wholeness, radiance, and quidditas.
For Nicolas Boileau and later Samuel Johnson, it was simply je ne
se quoi. What remains to be explored in Beckett is that level of
artistry that reects and touches the universal emotional life and
elicits from the least to the most sophisticated audience a deep identication and powerful catharsis. It is perhaps from this that all
meaningful philosophical issues arise, from this that the sudden and
intuitive revelation of the innite occurs, which Longinus, Kant,
Nietzsche, and Burke dene as the Sublime.
As Beckett states in the epigraph above, the aesthetic problem
for the contemporary artist is stylistic: a new form is needed to accommodate the chaos of experience: The mess invades our experi-
introduction
13
ence. . . . It is there and it must be allowed. . . . To nd a form that

accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now. Becketts
triumph, as I hope to illustrate, is that his greatest works (and I
shall use Waiting for Godot as my primary example) discover this
new form. Beckett incorporates the mess in its internal and external
manifestations by portraying not just the rational mind involved in
self- and worldly denition (the human situation), but also by portraying that mysterious, often turbulent zone of being that frequently invades rationality in order to liberate, victimize, or paralyze
the individual (human nature). He incorporates what I earlier called
the ubiquitous dimension of madnessnot just in plot or context, as
Dostoevsky, Kafka, Strindberg, Camus, and Sartre used itbut in its
very form, as an ordering and structural principle.
Becketts sophisticated understanding of total mental functioning
is striking in the light of the major studies on the syntax and structure of conscious and unconscious thought process. One might
think Beckett trained in this eld, given the incisiveness of his
knowledge of unconscious process and his evocation of the intertwining logical and unconscious mind. Clearly, his work at a mental
institution and longtime friendship with the psychiatrist Georey
Thompson, in addition to his two-year analysis with the prominent
psychiatrist W. R. Bion as well as his association with the Surrealists
and the Joyces, gave him ample opportunity to observe, absorb, and
discuss the harmonies and dissonances of these two interpenetrating thought patterns. Beckett was also gifted as a language student
and musician. Just as he never forgot paintings he had seen years
earlier and repeated shapes and forms in his stage designs, so too
he recalled and artistically utilized the cadences and linguistic patterns of irrational, schizophrenic conversation as he had studied and
heard them. What emerges from this unique dramatic rhetoric, this
intermingling of conscious and unconscious grammar and syntax,
is thus more than an image of Cartesian duality, or the battle between the I and me, or the heroic struggle to purify or under-
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introduction
stand the self or world, in spite of the Berkeleyan, Kantian, and

Wittgensteinian paraphernalia attached to Becketts language and
his characters perceptions. What emerges as well, alongside his
extremes of madcap activity and silence, is a carefully choreographed
display of rational and emotional levels of functioning. Becketts
characters may typically waver between knowledge and ignorance,
but they also waver between rational, socialized, altruistic behavior
and the aggressive, more narcissistic needs of self. Caught between
extremes in identities so tidily described by E. M. Forster as the beast
and the monk, the Beckett hero reveals how these seemingly contradictory dimensions operate in concert or conict, or in any variety
of combinations. Becketts focus is ultimately what Lionel Trilling
called the authenticity, rather than the sincerity, of self.
Beckett has undoubtedly responded to the same zeitgeist as W. B.
Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Sartre, Stravinsky, and Picasso: the fragmentation
of accepted values or, as Walter Lippmann put it, the death of the
ancestral order of custom and authority. But he has also rejected
their formal designs, their salvaging and piling up of a vast imagery
of moral, spiritual, technological, and social disintegration, in the
service of a new moral order. He has repudiated the modernists
mission, virtually Dantesque in scope, to recreate a meaningful
world by scaolding its fragments on to the symmetries of historical
and mythic patterns. For Joyce, Eliot, and the others, the fractured
present could ultimately be reconstructed in the terms of past tradition and past value systems. Theirs was an art of positive faith,
implicitly based on the boundless power of human will.
The positive element in Beckett is more modest. It arises in
the absence of any redemptive system, and because it is inevitably
eclipsed by inner or outer forces, when it appears it is poignantly
ennobling. When Becketts gures lift themselves momentarily
from the perplexity and terror of their fate, they attain a grand and
tragic status.
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15
In the main, however, Becketts work focuses on the feeling of

fragmentation and disintegration that occurs when one lives in the
absence of theological or cultural assurances and when one functions within the a priori constraints of language and the psyche.
From his earliest writing, even the youthful poems and short stories,
his always sophisticated young journeymen were lled with a terrible longing for purpose and wholeness in a world devoid of absolutes. They were also always driven by allusive emotional needs.
Unlike Eliots and Joyces modest but goal-directed heroes, testing
old assumptions and shoring up fragments for future reassemblage,
the Beckett quester always concluded in the environs in which he
began. His circular philosophical meditations were always in counterpoint to his unchanging (and corresponding) circular inner life.
To accomplish such an elaborate portrait of the mind, which he
best achieved in the plays, Beckett rst experimented with ction.
He redesigned the omniscient author and monologue functions by
creating a unique novelistic persona. He replaced traditional character and action with the fragmented self: with couples like Watt/Knott
and Molloy/Moran, who were comparable to his dramatic gures
Vladimir/Estragon, Krapp/the tapes. Each functioned not just as an
entity in itself but also as the uid half of a potentially integrated
whole. Despite each half s discrete relationship to time, space, language, and even body movement, the heart of either the ctional or
dramatic conict was always each ones putative center and whether
or not it was able to hold.
For many readers, Becketts novel was too dicult a form in
which to relate to the complex interstices of consciousness and the
unconscious. In addition, the fractured self was easily obscured by
the abstruse monologue format of the trilogy; in the earlier Murphy
and Watt, it was overwhelmed by a self-conscious, self-reexive, and
at times ironic or unreliable omniscient voice. All the same, the
novels and short stories addressed issues of isolation and fragmenta-
16
introduction
tion and were quests for both meaning and wholeness.

Drama proved a better format for particularizing the inner landscape. Lighting, sound eects, the timing of pauses, and even gesturing and diagonal or vertical movements and the level of voice
intonation, in addition to the most basic elements of character, plot,
and dialogue, could function as manifestations of a particular level
of mental functioning. The most subtle detailand Becketts plays
are known for their meticulous stage instructionscontributed to
Becketts intention and design, and each one, as in the trilogy, rened his portrayal of what it feels like to be bereft of a directing
and empowering ideal and what it feels like to lack a centered, cohesive psyche.
Becketts ability to give form to the universal self may explain why
his audiences cut across national boundaries, social class, age, and
education. Given the wide population his plays reach and the extraordinarily diverse responses they elicit, one is obliged to realize that
these seemingly sparse, minimalist works are actually rich tapestries
of evocative new poetic forms. His lyrical abbreviations and condensations of the inner emotional life go beyond even Prousts and
Joyces expansive creations. Beckett mirrors the generic and hence
most far-reaching rhetoric of universal mental functioning. Each
word, gesture, and movement is a vastly compact emotional stimulus to the audience to participate in and complete the work. This
may also explain why Beckett has elicited such an immense amount
of critical inquiry.
If great artists depict the universals of human experience, they also
reect particular epochs in the history of their culture. Beckett, to be
sure, wrote in an age when questions regarding the benets and
limitations of will and reason had become prominent. Although a
student of Descartes, Arnold Geulincx, Berkeley, Leibniz, and Kant,
perhaps more than any of his contemporaries, Beckett concentrated
introduction
17
on the emotional fallout of the rational-scientic quest, on the psychological consequences incumbent upon the pursuit of rationalism
in a world devoid of consensually validated truths. That his focus on
the emotional life may account for why his work deeply moves audiences is, however, not to ignore the philosophical implications of
his art to which the bulk of Beckett scholarship has been addressed.
Becketts heroes go to great lengths illustrating the creative uses to
which logic can be turned, and there is little doubt that these onetime scholars, philosophers, and writers are among his most poignant, often silly gures. In fact, the ironic implications of their
buoonery, along with their demonstrations of the limitations of
language and logic, place them in the mainstream of contemporary
philosophical and psychological thinking and in a quite dissimilar
context from the protagonists of Joyce, Kafka, and Eliot. Through the
self-reexive irony of his characters, Beckett echoes the concerns
raised by the great philosophers of our time, from Husserl and Heidegger to Foucault and Derrida. In his unique explorations of human nature and the human condition, Beckett shares these thinkers
preoccupation with the nature of mind, conscious and unconscious,
as the basic organizer, interpreter, and responder to reality.
Becketts characters struggle to survive in a world devoid of moral
certainty and validated cultural norms, and then they experience the
troubling consequences that such an engagement elicits: the blurred
distinctions between words and meaning, good and evil, madness
and sanityin other words, the mess, as Beckett described it.
This relativism resounds in all Becketts work, as it does throughout the intellectual and everyday life of our contemporary world.
That is, after the exaltation of materialism and science, many intellectual disciplines, including psychology, philosophy, philosophy of
science, and even physics, have had to contend with the disturbing
threat of relativistic doubt, the diculty of distinguishing fact from
explanation as well as fact from fact. Werner Heisenberg and quan-
18
introduction
tum physics, no less than Freud and Sartre, have demonstrated that
the limits of our universe are determined by the limits of our measuring instruments, whether they are atomic clocks, blood pressure
cups, or nouns and verbs.
Beckett, as the artist of the psychic distress born of relativism,
stands in relation to our time much as Sophocles, Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Chekhov did to theirs: a spokesperson and questing,
prophetic, empathetic recreator of the urge for order in a time of
doubt and historical transformation.
ONE
The First Forty Years, 190646:

Origins of a Vision and Form
Samuel Beckett began his creative siege in the room shortly after
the siege of World War II and produced during that period his greatest works, including Waiting for Godot, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The
Unnamable. Decorated for his activities in the Resistance, Beckett
had fought against the atrocities of the war, although before that
time he had borne witness to nearly half a century of human depredation and suering. The parameters of his maturation included
two world wars, two economic depressions (in Belfast and London),
and two civil wars (in Ireland and in wartime France). Beckett observed the gradual spread of totalitarianism across much of the
world and unrelenting campaigns of slaughter rising out of religious
and ethnic prejudice. He also observed the panoply of human responses to these events: indierence, pettiness, megalomania, bravery, and self-sacrice. He survived with a profound sense that evil
cannot go unattended and that the defense of the good, whether in
dramatic or modest action, gives dignity and meaning to life. He
19
20
the first forty years
approached his personal siege with rsthand knowledge of humanitys rapacious, benevolent, and sometimes ridiculous potential.
That his work would extend to the limits of tragedy and comedy, in a
form he called tragicomedy, is the result, in many ways, of the vision
he gained from his life experiences through 1946.
As an Irish citizen and neutral alien, Beckett did not have to take a
position during the war, but, as he told others, he could not stand by
with his arms folded and observe the suering around him. This
explanation is of particular interest because when speaking of his
happy childhoodYou might say I had a happy [a very good]
childhoodhe was compelled to add, But I was more aware of the
unhappiness around me. Beckett was an extraordinary man
modest, brilliant, gifted in several arts, loyal to his friends and family, uncommonly honest in his dealings with others, generous in the
extreme, and exquisitely sensitive to suering around him.
As the young child of auent Protestant parents living in Foxrock, a Dublin suburb, Beckett was not insulated from the world
around him by the privileges of his class. On the contrary, he was
very much aware of both the civil and world war occurring during
his childhood. His uncle, ghting with the British during the Great
War, had been severely injured. Issues of alliance, of joining the
British in World War I or of defying conscription to join the Irish
insurgents at home, were continually debated. After the Easter Uprising, children ran about Dublin, where Beckett was attending private school, carrying Irish ags and singing nasty ditties about the
English. Signs throughout the city proclaimed, We will serve neither King nor Kaiser. The great political leader James Connolly had
demanded that the Irish ght solely for their own independence, for
those natural rights which the British government [had] been asking them to die to win for Belgium.
Civil war endured in Ireland long after the Great War ended, with
shooting, curfews, ambushes, and murders in the street, and Beckett
21
retained vivid memories of the uprising throughout his life. His

father had taken him, when he was ten, to see Dublin in ames;
attending school in Dublin, he regularly saw British soldiers carrying guns throughout the city. Newspapers were lled with details of
the failed rebellion: the bloody retaliations of the Black and Tans, the
subsequent installation of martial law, and the names of the many
Irish who were deported, imprisoned, or executed before a ring
squad. Connolly and Padraic Pearce had spoken of the need for
sacrice with irresistible rhetoric, and they described the sacred nature of their mission: Men still know how to die for the holiest of all
causes: the practical brotherhood of the human race. The sacricial dimension of their calling was clear: We recognize that of us, as
of mankind before Calvary, it may truly be said: Without shedding of
Blood there is no Redemption. The notion of suering redeemed
through camaraderie and altruistic action would resound throughout Becketts work and life. In Waiting for Godot, each gure repeats,
in his own way, To every man his little cross, aware that salvation
arises alone from hearing the cries for help addressed to all mankind when all mankind is us.
If the wars constrained Becketts childhood happiness, so too did
upper-class Foxrock. Beggars roamed the countryside, as they did in
Dublin, and although Dublin had two lunatic asylums, in Foxrock
the mentally ill were kept at home. One such patient, near Becketts
house, was attended to by a keeper, a word that bothered the children
because they knew this as a term used in the zoo. In addition, many
retired service personnel lived in the Foxrock area because a war
pensioners hospital had been built near Becketts house. As a result,
Beckett often saw patients in various stages of physical and mental
debilitation; one of Becketts childhood friends recalls the children
witnessing the torn bodies of veterans daily.
In 1923, after the armistice and establishment of the Irish Free
State, Beckett entered Trinity College, which, like his previous
22
school, Portora, had been considerably changed by the recent wars.

Courses and lectures such as the well-established Donnellen series
recapitulated major issues arising out of the war. How, for example,
could an Irishman ght in a world war alongside a Briton, who was
his enemy in the civil war at home?
A great number of books on war and morality, science and religion were published during Becketts Trinity years. Many, like E. B.
Poultons Science and the Great War and J. B. Hunts War, Religion
and Science, undermined righteous prewar ideals and emphasized
the waste and despair of the present. The only remaining truths were
the emptiness of the old morality and the devastating demonstrations of human bestiality. Perhaps Paul Fussell was correct in his
later observation that World War I was the archetypal origin of the
modern, ironic vision of life, of the bitter reality that wars were
made by men.
The Great War ended, but a profound sense of indignity and injusticealongside ongoing ghting in the civil warcontinued for the
Irish. The mayhem of the times quashed any residual illusions of
Becketts youth, of a world based on rational systems of rational
adults, if not on rational reections of a divine and just order. In this
context, Becketts remark that he was raised almost a Quaker but
soon lost faith . . . after leaving Trinity is distinctly signicant.
After Beckett was graduated from Trinity in 1927, he spent what
he called a grim term teaching in Belfastgrim not only because of
its severe economic depression but because of its terrible bigotry.
The Civil Authorities (Special Powers) Act had given the Protestant
authorities wide and often unjustiable powers of arrest, search,
detention, and internment. There was no doubt that to be Protestant
was to be privileged and to be Catholic was to be visibly disenfranchised. Catholics were deprived of their jobs; marches of the unemployed were banned; restrictions increased on freedom of speech. It
is understandable that Beckett, a Protestant Irishman who had witnessed a civil war at home, should nd this a grim time. Again,
23
brother was ghting brother, anticipating the internecine rivalries

he would encounter in France during the Occupation. Here again
were issues of religious discrimination that were to become, just a
few years hence, the paramount obsession of Hitlers demented
crusade. After Belfast, Beckett spent a year in Paris, which became
his home in 1938. In the intervening years he lived mostly in London
and traveled through prewar Germany. His rst trip to Paris involved
teaching at the cole Normale Suprieure in fulllment of one of his
commencement honors at Trinity.
Paris in the 1920s was a dazzling city of frenetic energy and
prodigious creativity. Yet for all its gaiety and sophistication, an underlying cynicism and sadness enveloped the city. Numerous commentators attribute its mercurial moods to the spiritual and emotional devastation of the Great War. The grandest of human talents
had been subverted to the meanest of human purposes; civilization
had turned against and devoured itself.
The war had left the French, like people everywhere, in search of
solutions to ll the void left by shattered prewar ideals. Older but still
lively radical political communities like communism, socialism, and
anarchism appealed to many. Also compelling were the philosophical ideas systematized by Nietzsche, Freud, and the phenomenologists. A number of relatively new aesthetic ideologies, vertiginous
mixtures of Left and Right, were attractive as well: Futurism, Dadaism, the soon-to-be-fashionable Surrealism, and even the less political residual Cubism and early forms of Abstract Expressionism.
Voices from abroad, of Vorticists and Suprematists, of Die Brcke
and Der Blaue Reiter, gained a following. A revolution in the arts,
with entirely new uses of color, harmony, and linearity, might counter the decadence, waste, and distortions of realitythe lies, as Hemingway called themof earlier works and times.
Throughout Paris, the extremes of the avant-garde imagination
were visible, along with the popular forms of Czanne, van Gogh,
and Gauguin. The 192829 season included at least four Czanne
24
shows, and Czanne was an artist whose pictorial innovations would

inuence Becketts stage designs. On exhibition were the Cubists
and their Fauve successors, Picassos new guitars, constructed now
of painted metal, rather than paper, the biomorphic and geometric
abstractions of Arp and Mir, and Mondrians slick, intellectual puzzles. Visible as well, even in their many reproductions, were Duchamps readymades and his goateed Mona Lisa as well as Brancusis highly polished, elegant Bird in Space, at one and the same
time abstract and representational. Roger Vitrac and Antonin Artaud, famed for holding the mirror up to the unconscious, founded
Theatre Alfred Jarry in 1927. Sergey Eisensteins experimental cinematography and the avant-garde compositions of Alban Berg, Arnold Schoenberg, and George Antheil were gaining broad attention.
A new arrival from grim Belfast could only feel relief in the dynamic
environs of Paris.
The visual and aural imagery of the new arts had a powerful effect on Becketts work. His photographic memory enabled him,
years later, to duplicate in his stage settings and in his productions the design of paintings he had not seen for decades. Techniques of nonlinearity in painting, accomplished through image
fragmentation, dream imagery, and the intentional use of blank
canvaslike atonal music achieved through the statistical arrangement of notes and incorporation of silenceinuenced his use of
language, gesture, and stage setting. The ndings of the New Science concerning relativity, like those of the new linguists regarding
the ambiguity of language, complemented the artistic revolution
occurring around him.
The major artistic statements of Paris in 1928 emanated from the
Surrealists, and they had a profound impact on Beckett. The Surrealists had found a broad and encompassing salvation in psychoanalysis. To them, Freud explained civilization and its discontents at the
same time that he oered a kind of metaphysics for the exile, adrift
amidst the recent loss of religious, social, and family values. Psycho-
25
analysis promised an inner coherence to ll the personal or cosmic

loneliness of the times. It also validated the automatic formulas of
the new spontaneous and pure art forms.
Primarily devoted to unifying the inner and outer worlds, the
artistic goals of the Surrealists, as their spokesperson, Andr Breton,
expressed them, were pure psychic automatism, . . . the real process
of thought, [without] reason and . . . esthetic or moral preoccupation. Many Surrealists published in Eugne Jolass prestigious
transition, which, when Beckett arrived, was chiey associated with
Gertrude Stein and James Joyce. Joyce published seventeen installments of Work in Progress (later, Finnegans Wake) there. Beckett soon
came to work at and publish in transition.
Many of Jolass goals in publishing transition were identical to
those of the Surrealists. He demanded a Revolution of the Word
and insisted that the artist create a language to unite personal, inner
experience with the social world and cosmos. Pure poetry, he and the
Surrealists declared, is a lyrical absolute that seeks an a priori reality
within ourselves alone. In an issue with one of Becketts earliest
pieces, For Future Reference, transition included essays by Jung
and Jolas on the importance of the dream life.
In the Poetry is Vertical issue, which included Becketts short
story Sedendo and Quiescendo, Jolas published the Verticalist
Manifesto, signed by nine artists, including Beckett. An interesting
blend of Jolas, Freud, and Jung, the manifesto called for the hegemony of the inner life over the outer life. For Jolas, a unifying
mythos of dream and external would reveal the universal self in
relation to instinctive, primal consciousness and the transcendent
unity connecting all things.
That Jolass and the Surrealists primary goal was the hegemony
of the inner life over the outer life is important in understanding
Becketts later use of unconscious thought functioning. In the trilogy, for example, Beckett set up a universal and transcendental I,
but instead of identifying a unifying mythos, he focused on the Is
26
nal disintegration in the very act of measuring itself. Each of his

heroes was connected in the novels; in search of an irreducible self
or voice, each became the renement of his previous persona and
moved to silence in the impossible quest of reaching the core of
inner and outer reality. Only when Beckett began his dramatic writing did he achieve the balance between dream and reality; he also
created a transcendent Ialthough, as we shall see, his conception
of transcendence included the inner and outer self, not Jolass or
Bretons mystical, if temporary, synthesis.
As early as 1919, Breton had recognized that the mind has a
continuous thought process that exists below consciousness, which
Freud had called primary process. Breton had studied Freuds
writings and worked at the Charcot Clinic, where Freud had once
been in attendance. Focusing on Freuds dream theory, he made the
subtle observation that through the continuous operation of subterranean thought, the mind was naturally, as Lionel Trilling later
phrased it, a poetry-making organ. With its techniques of condensation, symbolism, and ambiguity and with its redenition of time
and space, poetry was indigenous to the very constitution of the
unconscious mind. Breton thus set forth as the rst tenet of Surrealism the artists obligation to retain the purity of unconscious
thought process, which could be accomplished through automatic
writing, without conscious control or awareness. He also proposed a
series of other techniques by which the rational mind could be kept
at bay. By the time Beckett began his association with transition,
Bretons notions of how reality and dream recreate and reenergize
one another had been much discussed.
In addition, bridging Becketts past and present, his close association with the Surrealists allowed him to observe their exposure of the
false dreams and hollow values that had produced the terrible war.
Many gures, including Andr Masson, Max Ernst, Paul luard,
Benjamin Pret, Breton, and Louis Aragon, had served in it, and
many now dened their revolutionary art as a diatribe against the
27
war; a number wrote commentaries on the wars spiritual and physical mutilations. In short, the Great War was an abiding topic of
conversation in the Paris of 1928.
Becketts contact with the painters and writers who gathered
around Breton introduced him not only to a variety of interesting
new art forms, but to an entirely new body of ideas. Their idealism
regarding the connectedness of all experience is apparent in Assumption, in which Becketts hero aspires to their point sublime of
inner and outer revelation, although this is unique in the Beckett
oeuvre. Despite their Marxist interests, of little appeal to the young
Beckett, the Surrealists wished to reconcile traditional contrarieties
and dualities and to integrate chance, mystery, and mysticism in
their quest to link opposites, like the inner and outer world, the
conscious and unconscious life. Theirs was an art of constant ux
and metamorphosis, as in dreams, where image and meaning continually connect and separate, where a sense of transcendence or
wholeness mingles with a sense of the fragile and tentative. They
pursued as well new parameters of time as it operates on both unconscious and conscious levels, for they strongly believed that the
unconscious recreates external reality, just as the external world refuels the inner one.
In the bookstores of Montparnasse, artists of all nationalities discussed the radically new perceptions of reality and self in the areas of
science, philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and art. Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead might have established, in a single
system, all the valid principles of mathematical reasoning, a set of
axioms upon which all rules would follow. But others, like Werner
Heisenberg and Kurt Gdel, were pursuing their claim that the observer inuences the observed and that any axiomatic system has
undecidable propositions (for example, although we ought to be able
to see ourselves in a mirror, we cannot see ourselves with closed
eyes). These and other bookshops in Paris stocked the most talkedabout authors, including Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Saussure, Ernst
28
Cassirer, Arthur Eddington, Jung, Freud, and Yeats. Not only did
Beckett spend a great deal of time in these shops, but, as one commentator reports, During this period [he] was obviously engaged in
reading everything he could lay his hands on.
In addition to meeting Jolas and the Surrealists and then working
on and publishing in the little magazines, Beckett began or renewed
several important friendships in Paris, often with people he idolized,
absorbing and incorporating from them specic interests and commitments (and, on occasion, mannerisms) that would last a lifetime.
Beckett met up again with Alfred Pron, whom he had known at
Trinity, and they renewed their lengthy conversations on art, literature, and language. When Beckett moved to Paris in the late
1930s their relationship became so close that Pron involved him in
the Resistance; Pron was subsequently captured and tortured by
the Nazis.
The poet and future art critic Thomas McGreevy was a new acquaintance who became an intimate, lifelong friend. Wounded during World War I, the sophisticated, older (by ten years) McGreevy
introduced Beckett to the circle of Dublin expatriates, as well as to
many of Pariss most celebrated intellectuals, including Joyce. One
learns as much about McGreevy in reading his commentaries on
Jack B. Yeats, Richard Addington, Eliot, Leonardo, and Poussin as
one learns about his subjects; he was a forthright idealist in advocating universal human rights and in believing that what matters in
art as in life [is] the classical trinity of the true, the good, and the
beautiful.
Through McGreevy and Joyce, Becketts literary circles soon
widened. He met Valry, Romains, Adrienne Monnier, Paul Lon,
William Butler Yeats and his younger brother Jack, Eliot, George
Reavy, Samuel Putnam, and many others. The profound eect of
Joyce, twenty-four years Becketts senior, cannot be overstated.
Joyce had three holy commitments: art, family, and friends. And
as numerous memoirs testify, he was a very generous man with a
29
profoundly humanitarian bent; he was also, to the surprise of many,

extremely political. He was a devout Parnellite in his youth and, as
an adult, was tortured by the knowledge of injustice occurring anywhere. He followed the politics of the cities in which he resided; his
letters reveal his unwavering concern with the plight of the Jews
during World War II. He was immensely proud to have created
Leopold Bloom as his hero in Ulysses; he thought the Odyssey to be a
Semitic poem. Joyce had numerous Jewish friends who, in the
passage of years, became Becketts close friends as well.
Although Beckett adored his father, Joyce, despite his own prolonged personal and family suering, came to function as a second
father, encouraging his work and providing him with a model of the
artists commitment to his craft. Perhaps in understanding this
relationship, one might conjecture that Joyce found in Beckett a
whole child, a young person he could truly help (he had ercely tried
to advance both his sons and daughters careers), just as Beckett
found in him a fatherly gure who was entirely approving. Joyce also
found in Beckett a unique intelligence that understood and appreciated his work; many of Joyces friends admitted they did not understand his new ction.
Perhaps another reason for Beckett and Joyces close association
was that the older man recognized in Beckett an idealized image
of himself as a youth. There were physical resemblances, and they
had had any number of similar childhood interests and experiences. But as parents sometimes relive in their children their unfullled youth, Joyce may have vicariously experienced in Becketts
lial devotion the feelings he had never overtly expressed to his
beloved father.
By the end of the 1930s, after Beckett moved to Paris, his relationship with Joyce was so close that Joyce thought of him as his child.
Beckett began to imitate Joyces personal mannerisms: his smoking,
his posture when sitting, and even his choice of shoes. The two
walked together and spent evenings in intellectual discussion and in
30
sharing their family and moral values. Beckett learned about Joyces
onerous publishing experiences and about artistic forbearance. He
observed the modesty of great celebrity: Joyce met [people] face to
face, as unassuming in his behavior as he was uncompromising in
his aims. People lionized him but he would not roar. He once said
to an academic who wanted to exalt him, Dont make a hero out of
me. Im only a simple middle-class man.
As Beckett himself was to be, Joyce was uncommonly supportive
of both friends and aspiring young artists. Yeats and Pound had
encouraged him to publish; he was encouraging Beckett and numerous others. Beckett, too, would become a mentor to many young
writers, including Harold Pinter, who never produced or published a
play until Beckett had read it. It was as though a legacy of respect and
kindness were being passed from one generation to the next.
Regardless of his personal sorrows, Joyce always exercised a sense
of humor, one that had no sniggering defeatism in it. Even in
moments of silence and pessimism, there was inevitably a festive
pause when Joyce would start dancing and singing with whirling
arms, high-kicking legs, grotesque capers, and coy grimaces. Such
behavior corresponds to the transformations he was eecting in his
art, intermingling matter and spirit, conquering tragedy through
humor. Beckett, like Joyce, would come to understand humor as a
defense against lifes tribulations.
These traits persisted in the older Joyce, when he resisted his
daughter Lucias institutionalization and worried about a second
world war. Even in his blackest moods, he retained concern for others and a wry sense of humor. Immersed as he was in writing, Joyce
well understood the cycles of joy and sadness. His response, as an
ordinary person and as an artist, was that of the healing comedian.
Within a short period, Beckett wrote several pieces. His ninetyeight-line poem Whoroscope won a prize when submitted to
Nancy Cunards Hours Press; Cunard had been closely associated
with the Surrealists. Beckett also wrote Proust, one of the rst in-
31
depth studies of A la recherche; many of its remarks are reected in

Becketts later work, particularly those insisting that form and content be one; that people adjust to the ordeals of survival by engaging
in lives of habit; and that the only artistic avenue available to the
artist, if intent on capturing the reality or the authenticity of being, is
through the excavation of the unconscious life during moments of
latent consciousness, over which one lacks rational control. These
intuitive, emotional explorations are explosive and unruly; they
cannot be importuned. They bring one in contact with the purest
and least diluted part of self, and one remains powerless over the
source from which they emanate.
Becketts earlier essay in Our Exagmination Round His Factication for Incamination . . . , on Joyces Work in Progress, foreshadowed Proust and his later work as well. Here, Beckett praises Joyce,
as he would Proust, for his inseparability of form and content. Again
he indicates the import of the inner mental landscape as the subject
and form of art, as well as his awareness of the artists awesome task
in forging a language to serve this function. Joyce had explained to
Beckett, I wished to invade the world of dreams and I have put the
language to sleep. Becketts essay functioned to clarify related
goals of the transition Verticalists and Revolution of the Word proponents. Form and subject in Becketts work would also be unied, as
conscious and unconscious thought patterns (dreams) would reect
the excavation of the deepest core of self.
Joyce was uncanny in his understanding of these excavations,
which were similar to Freuds revelations. To everyones wonder,
Joyce could follow his daughters schizophrenic speech; she spoke
in a form over which he had control. What mystied Joyce (and
later Beckett) was not the world of the unconscious but the world of
logic. Why all this fuss and bother about the mystery of the unconscious? Joyce asked. What about the mystery of the conscious?
Becketts relationship with Joyce and others, like his new career as
a writer and his association with Pariss avant-garde, occurred during
32
one of the worlds most ignominious periods. The era marked the
rise of totalitarianism throughout the world. The press detailed Hitlers escalating brutality against the Jews, reporting on concentration
camps as early as 1933, and Germanys gradual takeover of European
nations. The arrogant Hitler encouraged wide coverage of his various
steps toward ethnic purication. Newspapers not only accommodated; many, in their editorial policies, reected the indierence of
most of the world.
Between Becketts rst and nal move to Paris, he spent a brief
period in Dublin. His college honors required that he follow two
years of teaching at the cole by three more at Trinity. Beckett did not
like teaching and, in his own words, behaved very badly: I ran away
to the Continent and resigned. As he explained, he could not tolerate the hateful comedy of lecturing . . . to others what he did not
know himself.
Becketts most important friendship during this period was with
the painter Jack B. Yeats, thirty-ve years his senior. Here was another older Irish artist with whom he could identify. The two shared
a deep compassion for the alienated and disenfranchised, and they
manifested this in remarkably similar artistic subjects and settings.
Since his youth, Yeats had been outspoken in the cause of Irish independence, but by the time of the Irish civil war and World War I he
was overcome by the grotesqueries and bloodshed of world events.
The war that broke out in Ireland after the British left in 1922, the
defeat of Republican forces, and the souths transformation into a
British dominionwith Ireland, in essence, still paying allegiance
to the Crownleft Yeats totally disillusioned. By 192930, he had
abandoned the politically and socially realistic images that marked
his early style. He also began a career as a novelist. During this
period he and Beckett became friends.
In his new paintings, Yeats reworked thirty-year-old political
sketches to convey the inherent contradictions of the human condition. His images grew increasingly complex and resistant to sum-
33
mary. Experimenting with opacity and the diusion of linearity, he

released himself from his earliest associations with the concrete
image. Eventually, memory, that is, the concrete experience, and the
dream and free associative state became inseparable, and he used
the interplay of image and painterly texture to convey this complex
condition of thought. As removed as he had been from the Surrealists, Verticalists, and other avant-garde movements on the Continent, he evolved an esthetic that in many ways echoed theirs. He
sought to exteriorize the twilight area between fact and possibility,
experience and illusionexperience as a product of conscious and
unconscious response. Like Joyce in his manipulations of dream
language in Finnegans Wake, Yeats used paint to evoke the way experience and objects appear before they are categorized in the rational
mind. Later Beckett analogically wrote in The Unnamable, You must
say words, as long as there are any, until they nd me, until they say
me strange pain strange sin.
The ephemerality of human experience remained Yeatss consuming theme, with humanity now obliged to come to terms with
itself in an environment free of external interference. His gures,
often the socially oppressed or clowns, were subject to the indifference of nature or to forces beyond nature. Yeats then created
images without specic backgrounding or clear-cut referents. Here
was the human condition in its most authentic state, the self within
the self. Conict occurred in the private forums of being, where
individuals do battle with the wild, uncompromising nature of an
unknowable reality.
In Yeatss last images, he accomplished goals similar to those
of the Verticalists. He reduced the artists control of his universe
to zero, aware of both the indeterminacy of meaning and selfknowledge at the same time as he accepted the interplay of conscious
and unconscious thought. He realized that at best he could capture
only process or the stages of the image. Hence, his lonely
vagabonds, torn between promise and regret, inhabitants of life-
34
contemporaneous-with-death, were frequently painted at twilight.

This was Yeatss visual expression of the life of words half-said . . .
and even quarter said, his expression of the human tragedyin
Becketts words, the elemental sin of birth into impotence and
ignorance, humankind on the isthmus between knowledge and
powerlessness. To Beckett, Yeats had excavated those perilous zones
of being in an eort to evoke that which eludes denition: What is
incomparable . . . is [his] sending us back to the darkest part of the
spirit, [to] the great internal reality.
After leaving Trinity, at the end of 1931, Beckett visited his family
in Kassel, Germany. His cousin Peggy, about whom much has been
speculated regarding their romantic attachment, had begun to show
signs of the tuberculosis that would soon take her life. He returned
to Paris in March 1932, but his stay was unexpectedly terminated in
May, when the French president, Paul Doumer, was assassinated.
Becketts papers were not in order, and because he lacked a valid
carte de sjour, or permanent resident status, he was forced to leave
the country, and he returned to Dublin.
Beckett moved to London at the end of 1933, where he remained
for nearly three years. These were, as he put it, bad yearsbad in
every way. Perhaps most critical was the death of his father in
June, shortly after the death of his beloved cousin Peggy. Despite his
geographical distance from Joyce, Beckett was also deeply grieved to
hear of Joyces tribulations. Joyce was now compelled to commit
Lucia to a sanitorium, and, nearly blind in his right eye and with
minimal vision in his left, he had been advised to undergo yet another eye surgery. In addition, Joyce had become obsessed with the
pornography trial of Ulysses, and his insomnia and the stomach ailment that ultimately took his life grew more severe.
Any of these personal events might have been suciently grave
to depress Beckett, but he had professional problems as well. A
teaching career was now unthinkable, and although he had begun to
establish a literary reputation in Paris, the forced move out of France
35
was deeply disruptive. Finally, and of no small consequence, Beckett moved to depression London during the devils decade. He
witnessed not only vast starvation and poverty and many useless
marches once again, but also the governments vast indierence to
momentous cries for help. He experienced ethnic prejudice, as well:
They always know youre an Irishman. [Their] tone changes. The
taximan says, another sixpence, Pat. They call you Pat.
Becketts exile, in every instance, seems to have elicited his exquisite sensitivity to the suering around him. If, during his happy
childhood, he was aected by the plight of vagrants, the mentally ill,
and the wounded veterans of World War I, and later, by the poverty
and discrimination in Belfast, the sheer magnitude of destitution in
depression London intensied his unhappiness. At about this time,
Becketts beloved half-Jewish uncle, Peggys father, felt suciently
threatened by Nazi activity to leave Germany. Beckett had long been
interested in the Jewish plight. Joyce had frequently spoken of himself as a Jew, and he equated the Jews and Irish as persecuted peoples, as mentioned above. And in London during 1933, the press was
lled with headlines regarding the beginning of Hitlers consecrated
preparation to conquer the civilized world, including Nazi bloodbaths, Nuremberg rallies, book burnings, and separate schools for
Jewish children. As Richard Ellmann noted, forty years after the
war the subject of Jewish suering made Beckett weep. A line
from Waiting for Godot reects the sensibility of one keenly aware of
the dierent fates life bestows: Remark that I might just as well
have been in his shoes and he in mine. If chance had not willed
otherwise.
Beckett did survive the terrible London crisis. He underwent psychoanalysis, developed sustaining friendships, and read a great deal.
He pursued a career in journalism, writing scholarly and literary
reviews; he published translations and began his novel Murphy.
His rst collection of short stories, More Pricks than Kickssome of
which were reworkings of the unnished Dream of Fair to Middling
36
Womenand his cycle of thirteen poems, Echos Bones and Other

Precipitates, were published during this period.
Beckett witnessed, during these London years, a transformation
of the English cultural scene that proved salubrious to his personal
and artistic growth. The years 193334 were pivotal in English stage
history because of new production and acting styles initiated for the
most part by John Gielgud and then Laurence Olivier. Old-style romance and sword-and-dagger panache, uninspired diction, and selfconscious, feigned emotion were replaced by simpler staging and a
focus on the text, on slower and clearer diction, and on gesture and
carriage. With the concentration on elocution and the use of voice
came an emphasis on the spoken word. The distinctly new styles of
acting alerted Beckett to new possibilities in the dramatic-lyric form.
The French Surrealists arrived in London in 1935 to assist in the
long-awaited celebration of their English counterparts the following
year. Beckett had been in frequent contact with the artists connected
with the great exhibition, which Breton and Eluard attended. The
English Surrealists also had found a way of dealing with reality in an
art that exalted the dream as a creative source, the kingdom of the
irrational within ourselves; they too held a credo that was curiously compatible with psychoanalysis, which Beckett was now experiencing rsthand in his analysis with W. H. Bion.
Beckett was a patient of Bion at the Tavistock Clinic; Bions psychoanalytic practice at the time consisted of shepherding patients
through various stages of dream experience to self-knowledge. An
unusually erudite man, Bion had mastered the philosophy of H. J.
Patou and written numerous works on Kant, justice, reason, perception, and time; he had also written an autobiography that recounted
his demoralization as a soldier.
Bions main goal in analysis was to assist his patients in moving
from what he called the alpha to the omega stage, the point of Onement or O perhaps the origin of the o in Godot. Rather
than a cure, the process was a probing of self aimed at personal
37
integration. As Bion explained, analysis was self-revelatory through

dream analysis. Cure or improvement, he wrote, is both irrelevant and undesirable. Onement involved a journey to the ineable, absolute reality and unity of the fragmented self. Because it was
a religious or mystical experience, ones knowledge of O could barely
be translated into language.
As a part of Bions therapy, and accompanying each of his books,
was a grid (his term), an elaborate notational chart that indicated the
various therapeutic stages one might take toward the O state. A, or
alpha, for example, indicated when patients set aside memory in the
gestation of dream formation; B, or beta, indicated their inability
to use A properly, for in unsuccessfully dealing with memory and
sense impressions, they might be led to feelings of persecution. K
indicated the words or analogies artists and great leaders might
speak at having attained the O stage.
Bion supported many of Freuds clinical ndings. He agreed, for
example, that the language of the unconscious or of dream experience was the everyday speech of schizophrenics that schizophrenics live in a continual dream state. He also worked through
Freuds tentativeness toward the life and death instinct in Civilization and its Discontents. Like Jung, however, Bion was interested
in the collective unconscious, and this was of particular interest
to Beckett, for he had considered writing his Trinity thesis on Romains and the Unanimistes and their belief in a preexisting moral
sensibility.
By 1933, Beckett had read both Freud and Jung. About that time
he visited his psychiatrist friend Georey Thompson in his London
training hospital, Bethlehem Royal and took a job there for a year as
an attendant, an experience that inuenced him very much. By
the end of his two-year analysis, Beckett was once again discussing
the nature of mental functioning with Thompson, as the two visited
the wards together and reected on the language and behavior of
the mentally ill. Given Bions emphasis on symbolic language and
38
dream analysis, as well as Becketts own reading of Freud and Jung

and his experiences with Joyces daughter, Beckett was observing the
dream speech of the institutionalized patients, which he would use
in his later work, just as Bions grid points would provide a prole of
many of his characters.
In 1935, Beckett attended a lecture at the Tavistock and heard Jung
describe the healthy unconscious as an unknown collection of fragmented selves to which the artist gives form in ctional characters.
Jung also expounded on the anatomy of unconscious process and
how it expands or asserts itself in normal thought function through
increasingly lightened circles of energy. Its deepest part, the collective unconscious, occupies the darkest, smallest circle, he said.
Schizophrenics, who function continuously in unconscious thought
process, live, so to speak, in the realm of darkness. The similarities
of Bions concept, with its metaphors of light and dark,to the mystical images of Dante, Plato, Schopenhauer, and Leibniz are striking.
Beckett left London shortly before Christmas and returned to
Dublin. He took on odd jobs like tutoring and spent a period of time
reading at the Trinity College library. He was determined to complete Murphy, which was to become his rst published novel (1938).
It is a funny book about a jobless young Dublin man who moves to
London, in fact, to the same area in which its author had just lived,
and who strives for the total separation and control of mind from
body. Murphy works in a mental institution and yearns to attain a
state like the patients self-immersed indierence to the contingencies of the contingent world. They seem to have reached a Jungian
or Bion-like state of Onement that unites all fragments: the silence
of the universe, in which light and dark [do] not clash, nor alternate, nor fade nor lighten. Murphy, however, who suers from
heart, foot, and neck problems, remains tied to personal and amorous connections and is incapable of freeing himself from time and
place. Bound to the ux, commotion, and light of ordinary experience, he resubjects himself to the accidents of the physical world,
39
which conclude with his ashes being strewn on a barroom oor

amidst sawdust and cigarette butts.
Beckett made a short trip to Dublin after leaving London and then
traveled extensively through Germany. Although he spent a great
deal of time looking at art, the primary reason for the trip was his
need to come to terms with Germany as a nation. He had long felt a
deep sense of aection for the country, spending considerable time
there with his family, during which he was introduced to some of the
centurys greatest art; the German language had also been part of his
Trinity concentration. The trip functioned as a means of verifying
the increasingly terrible reports he had read about the moral descent
of the German citizenry. He had to see for himself the condition of
the civilization he had both studied and respected.
According to Becketts close friend Gottfried Bttner, the trip was
partially a continuation of his education. Beckett had read Eduard
von Hartmann, who opened the debate on the notion of the subconscious. The trip in addition furthered his art education, as he
traveled from one gallery to another. Beckett was interested in the
Germany of the Surrealists. As Anna Balakian explains, the Surrealists were Germanophiles during the 1920s and until Hitler came to
power. Until he condemned Hitler in 1935, Breton was thoroughly
fascinated with the marvelous country that had given birth to and
nurtured Kant, Hegel, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Marx. Hegel had,
after all, expressed his belief in the inner unity of contradictory
phenomena and dened knowledge as the linking of thought and
object. The Surrealists had also sought unity among contradictions
of the self and world, the concrete and the abstract. Beckett wished to
visit the home of this important art movement.
What Beckett came to observe was a society held in thrall by a
false idol in whose name all manner of brutality was rationalized as
sacred. He visited and learned of the despicable treatment given the
great art critic Willi Grohmann. He witnessed the dangers of an
ideological aesthetic. Hitler and Goebbels, both frustrated artists,
40
were using art as a political instrument, as a reection of and means

toward racial superiority and domination. Perhaps Becketts awareness of this played a role in his later fashioning a form that was
largely free of concrete place, person, and partisan political ideology.
Finally, as Bttner suggests, Beckett visited Germany in an attempt to describe and come to terms with the desolate age. Schopenhauer, one of the few that really matter, said Beckett, might
have provided him with a framework for understanding the terrible
world around him. The World as Will and Idea might have accounted
for the perverse use of power that now dominated German culture.
Later, as Beckett wrote Waiting for Godot, Bttner continues, the
monsters lurking in each and every one of us may well have
emerged from the depths of [his] memories.
Bttner says that Becketts long correspondence with him revealed that the trip not only exposed the cultural catastrophe of the
rising Nazi leadership, but also helped Beckett clarify his worldview
and presented another pathway to his innermost self. Becketts
visits to cemeteries reinforced his sense of human transience and
armed the wisdom of the agesthe advice of the Italian Giacomo
Leopardi, for example, whom Beckett frequently quotedregarding
the stoicism necessary to meet the gloom of experience. In sum, the
German journey, Bttner concludes, contributed to Becketts hardwon equanimity and admirable mastery of the [desolate] conditio
humana of modern times. It was preparatory for the tests that
would follow of his physical and creative ability to survive.
Once in Germany, Beckett had a close-up view of the political
situation. More than a hundred newspapers circulated, including
the popular anti-Semitic weekly Vlkischer Beobachter and papers
published by each of the Nazi leaders. By 1938, Goebbels had rened
his paper as a weapon of war, publishing unambiguous pronouncements that old scores from the inequitable Versailles Treaty
of 1919 would be settled with buckets of blood. In 1937, it was
41
punishable for visitors and citizens alike to possess a newspaper

from any of twenty specied countries.
As Beckett traveled from city to city, he observed the strict enforcement of the brutally severe anti-Semitic Nuremberg laws.
When Beckett had left England, British sentiment toward Germany
was complex and ambivalent, similar to that in many other countries. Support for appeasement or neutrality vied with sentiment for
intervention. Hitler had been diabolical in playing individuals and
nations like the French and British against each other. The issues at
stake were support of Czechoslovakia and Spain versus the need to
keep the peace. To Beckett, Hitlers intentions grew increasingly
more obvious. He demanded the return of all preWorld War I
German colonies and the cancellation of all reparation payments. He
began increasing arms production and conscription. When he announced the actual pursuit of lebensraum, living space, his intent
to go to war was patent.
Sensing that war was imminent, Beckett left Germany. Before
making his nal move to Paris, he stopped briey in London and
Dublin. In Dublin he testied against Oliver St. John Gogarty,
charged with anti-Semitic defamation by his uncles brother. Beckett
began extensive research for a play about Dr. Johnson and Mrs.
Thrale entitled Human Wishes. He also learned that on Herbert
Reads recommendation (and after forty-two rejections), Murphy had
been accepted for publication.
Once settled in Paris, Beckett renewed his friendship with Joyce.
On the night of January 7, 1938, an event occurred that has often been
associated with Becketts portrayals of the unfathomability of life. He
was held up by a pimp, and when he resisted, the thief stabbed him in
the chest, inicting a near-fatal wound. Beckett subsequently asked
his assailant why he had chosen him, and when the man replied, Je
ne sais pas, monsieur, Beckett did not press charges. Given the
nature of the world he had been witnessing, Beckett may have felt
42
that he had no special entitlement to freedom from attack or that

random aggression was less evil than state-organized crime. The
words I dont know, Sir are spoken by Godots messengers in
regard to the just nature of Godot.
During his subsequent two-week stay in the hospital he was visited regularly by Joyce and by Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, a
pianist at the Paris Conservatoire. Suzanne later became Becketts
wife. In the fall of 1938, he and Suzanne moved into the seventhoor apartment at 6 rue des Favorites that they would occupy until
1961. Here, Beckett wrote some poems that were published after the
war and began translating Murphy into French with his friend Alfred
Pron.
The French press continued to detail world events: Hitlers overt
pugnacity, the Japanese capture of Canton and Hankow, Mussolinis
incorporation of Libya as a part of Italy, Francos assault on Catalonia, and the ongoing Soviet purges. Headlines called attention to
Germanys internal aggression against Jews, as exemplied by the
rampages and massacre of Kristallnacht in November 1938, and its
external threats against its neighbors.
Beckett owned and studied Mein Kampf in 1942. When he rst
read it, however, is uncertain; the London Times had published
excerpts in 1933, Les Temps, in 1938. Beckett did follow the events
of the thirties, not just in London but in Germany and the rest of
the world. Through his experiences during this terrible decade he
gained a sense of the extraordinary cruelties people are capable of
imposing on one another, whether through passive indierence or
active deeds. Was I sleeping while the others suered? he asks in
Waiting for Godot. And Hamm in Endgame says, Youre on earth,
theres no cure for that!
Although Beckett did not see the full extent of the Nazi atrocities,
his journey through Germany and subsequent world events as reported in the French press furnished him with images of incredible
moral depredation. His rsthand experience of the Nazi regime was
43
crucial in his swift decision to resist the German evil actively, rather
than accept it passively, when Hitlers troops moved into Paris. Perhaps he thought, as Vladimir says in Godot, Let us not waste our
time in idle discourse! . . . Let us do something, while we have the
chance! It is not everyday that we are needed. . . . At this place, at this
moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. . . . Let
us represent worthily for once the foul brood to which a cruel fate
consigned us!
In November 1940, he joined Alfred Pron in the Resistance in
Paris. In both occupied and unoccupied France, the expurgation of
the Jews was escalating. At the same time, many organizations were
printing anti-Nazi propaganda, and many action groups carried out
sabotage activities. Beckett was one of the earliest to join in these
resistance groups in 1940.
Beckett was always reluctant to discuss his war activities, but one
can review them as they emerge out of the historical record of World
War II. His Paris group, Gloria, was funded by Special Operations
Executives (SOE) Prosper. (Winston Churchills SOE oversaw all
underground activities in the occupied nations, and its only requirements were that its non-French agents speak impeccable French and
have a thorough knowledge of French culture.) The Resistance
scholar Henri Michel reports that Gloria, like the other small circuits, retained its autonomy and conducted business as it wished.
The same independence was true of Etoile, another group with
which Beckett was associated. All the same, as M. R. D. Foot reports,
Gloria, again like the other small circuits, looked to Prospers leaders, Franois Suttill, a poet, and Armel Guerne, a translator, for arms
and supplies. Although the leaders met regularly with resisters at a
black market restaurant near the Arc de Triomphe and at a caf near
Sacre-Coeur, some of Guernes intellectuals, like Samuel Beckett,
had the intelligence and the security sense to lie low.
Becketts specic assignments with Gloria at rst involved collecting information, sometimes in code, regarding German troop
44
movements, which he deciphered, classied, and typed before it was

smuggled out to London; later on, he transferred the information to
microlm. In August, after one of Glorias members was tortured
until he confessed, Becketts friend Pron was arrested, and the rest
of the group faced imminent exposure; only thirty of eighty survived
in the end. At 11 a.m. on August 15, Prons wife sent Suzanne
and Beckett a telegram, telling them to leave Paris immediately. By
3 p.m., they were gone, traveling mostly on foot and at night toward
Roussillon, in the unoccupied zone in the south. Jack MacGowran
speaks of Beckett in ight as a key man for whom Nazi bullets
were marked.
Once in Roussillon, Becketts clandestine activities included setting up contacts between Resistance workers and the pickup, hiding,
and delivering of ammunition for the destruction of railroad yards
used in transporting German supplies. By the time Beckett arrived
in Roussillon, the Germans had invaded the unoccupied zone; all
native and foreign-born Jews not in hiding were routinely picked up
and killed or deported. The Germans intensied their recruitment of
French males for their factories, with the result that more and more
young men joined the maquis. By this time, anyone suspected of any
kind of underground activity faced grave danger.
Roussillon served Beckett well, as one learns from the extensive
research of the French cultural historian Laurence Wylie, whose
study of Roussillon allows one to ll in some of Becketts dramatically dierent day- and nighttime activities during the last two and a
half years of the war. Wylie describes the village of Roussillon as a
natural hideout for someone on the run. Thirty-ve miles from Avignon, it was accessible only by car or bike. Even before the war, the
area was known as an escape from civilization. During the war, it
became a refuge for many escaping the German conscription law. As
such, it became a natural home for the growing number of maquis,
especially during 194344.
Survival in Roussillon was not dicult. Although Beckett rented
45
a house (still referred to as la maison Beckett) next to the local

leader of the maquis, free housing was readily available. Because the
towns population had shrunk from 1,600 to 779, many of the older
houses were unoccupied and unowned. The old deserted windmills
also sheltered refugees, and for fast concealment the many abandoned quarries in the clis had entries marked by black holes left
from stone erosion. One could raise goats for milk and cheese, harvest grain for bread, and cultivate the local berries for fruit and jelly.
Beckett worked as a farmer.
The villagers welcomed Beckett as they had the many other refugees who settled there. His keen awareness that he was an Irishmanbecome-Parisian resistance agent, whose circuit had been exposed
a targeted man in hidingmay explain his odd registration at the
town hall as Samuel Beckett from Dublin, England. But the wife of
Becketts painter-friend Henri Hayden, also in Roussillon, makes
clear that the villagers were no more suspicious of him than of one
another. They had a deep sense of privacy and had no idea of
Becketts recent past; they grew to like this new member of their
community. Furthermore, she explains of Becketts work in the
elds, he [labored] out of friendship with the peasants.
It seems inconceivable that Beckett would not have feared exposure, but all reports point to the contrary. He welcomed structured
activity like a job in Roussillons shrinking war and black-market
economy or any physical activity to make his days meaningful. He
loved the open country and frequently walked long distances. The
villages sparse mountainous areas, extraordinarily clear air, and remarkable ruins, windmills, and quarries reminded him of his childhood Ireland.
Resistance activity at night gave purpose to his life, as did his
writing. He wrote Watt during these years, which acted as a kind of
healing process, as he put it, to get away from war and occupation.
It was a means of staying sane. Beckett came to share what Wylie
calls the villagers strong sense of survival, of dbroussillement or
46
systme d-, that is, their stoical accommodation to whatever was

required of them to endure. Pursuing life as usual during war, this
systme d- was another important model in Becketts growing armation of human durability.
To be sure, the townspeople knew the maquis were everywhere,
settling old accounts with friends and enemies but blaming the
Germans and Vichy. If they were organized, it was as much through
the friendship system as through the Fighting French or SOE. Resistance activity continued in nearby Apt, Saint Saturnin, and Goult
as well, but the center of maquis activity was in Gordes, ve kilometers away. On one occasion, after tracing the maquis to Gordes, the
Germans brought tanks and artillery to a hilltop and opened re,
destroying many houses and a large part of the terrain. This event,
like the loud denunciations and public executions in Saint Saturnin,
did not overtly concern the Roussillians, who looked the other way.
Most knew that one Alsatian in their midst was maquis, as was
Becketts next-door neighbor and another who adopted numerous
orphans. During the day, these maquisards pursued their lives of
habit and family responsibility; at night, they arranged private rendezvous. The townspeople did not live in a state of fear because they
were scattered and, more important, because they had a prosperous,
caring Vichy mayor who was committed to keeping things quiet.
Numerous Roussillon maquis victories are on record.
Interestingly, Foot attributes the inspiration of the Resistance
throughout Europe to a person still within living memory: Michael
Collins, military chief of the Irish Republican Army during the troubles of 191622. To Foot, Collins was the greatest resistance leader
of the century. He understood the tactics of what he called irregular
warfare and the basic grammar of sabotage. The Irish resistance
under Collins during 191621 was, in Foots opinion, comparable to
France in 193945. Although Foot admits that not many Europeans would have heard of Collins and thus associated the French
and Irish situations, Beckett surely would have done so.
47
Beckett dismissed his World War II activities as boy-scout stu,

a typically modest response, but he was one of very few to join the
Resistance as early as 1940. And when he later took refuge in Roussillon, rather than cower in hiding, he fought with the maquis. Following the war, he was decorated by Charles de Gaulle with the Croix
de Guerre for his distinguished noncombatant activities. Becketts
medal, with a silver star, indicates specic acts of bravery in divisional despatch. The phrase suggests an alignment with a ghting
unit, such as the French Forces of the Interior, which had, by that
time, amalgamated members of the SOE, Resistance, and Maquis.
He also received the Mdaille de la Rsistance. To both of these
honors, he responded with typical reserve and humility.
Alec Reid remarks of Becketts early involvement with the Resistance, [He] took no active part in aairs until the Germans occupied Paris. . . . Then the war suddenly became something personal
and with meaning. Like Joyce, Beckett had many Jewish friends and
he was incensed by the constant humiliations and maltreatments to
which they were subjected. He was enraged too at the repeated
shootings by the Germans of innocent people taken as hostages. . . .
He couldnt stand with his arms folded. Beckett may have seemed
apolitical in the traditional sense of the term, but he had powerful
convictions regarding his moral obligations to others. He could not
accept the evil imposition of suering on others with his arms
folded, whatever the personal risk. The war further enabled Beckett
to engage in activities requiring the kind of courage of which his
father and uncles would have been proud. It allowed him an arena in
which to activate those values he had always deeply held. And if, in
the passage of these terrible years, he despaired over the unjust
deaths of friends and acquaintances, his activities allowed him an
outlet in which to pursue a kind of justice for them.
As a man of exquisite feeling and introspection, and as a survivor,
Beckett, I believe, by 1940, was able to balance the events of his life,
as one juggles art and life, experience and ideology. In the process of
48
maturing and separating from a well loved and loving family, he

rejected his familys Victorian values of nancial security and traditional marriage, while he retained their fundamental commitment
to virtue. He developed close associations with others who shared
his high sense of moral integrity and who encouraged his independence and artistic pursuits.
The war and its aftermath gave Beckett an opportunity to become
his own person: to practice, if you will, the moral ideals he had been
taught at home and school and thus to integrate the values of his
childhood and adulthood. The war was an opportunity to confront,
not merely contemplate, matters of human will, moral choice, and
good and evil. Beckett had long been a devoted student of philosophy, but for the remainder of his life he maintained that he was no
philosopherand one should probably take him at his word. He
never reached the certainties of Plato, Aristotle, the stoics, Kant, or
even his contemporaries Camus and Sartre. Neither did he demonstrate the kind of religious faith that had moved other resisters.
Beckett had, nevertheless, demonstrated the highest values of moral
commitment. If, as the philosophers had taught him, virtue is dependent upon character and action, rather than being the product
of an a priori state of being or meaning, then Becketts actions
throughout the war were exemplary. Although under no immediate
threat himself, Beckett repeatedly put his life in danger to battle the
enemies of human decency.
Furthermore, ghting an enemy of uncontested and categorical
evil enabled Beckett to respond to a pain that he had carried since
childhood, namely, the experience of Irelands Civil War, which introduced him at an early age to the depths of human suering. As he
told more than one person, he never forgot the day in 1916 when he
saw OConnell Street in ames. Now, in 1940, he would witness
another nation torn from within: French ghting French as the Resistance opposed the Vichy collaborators, just as in Ireland, twentyve years earlier, he had seen kinsmen ghting kinsmen. At the end
49
of the war, when the maquis marched in victory through Roussillon,

there stood Beckett at the front of the procession, carrying the
ag. One can only imagine the pride and relief that prompted
such a rare gesture of public display. But given the complexity of the
times and the man and the lessons he had learned about potential
good and evil in human nature, he remained, thereafter, entirely
modest about the war. His nephew, Edward Beckett, reports that his
uncle never spoke about his wartime experiences except in very
general terms.
In May 1945, Beckett returned to Ireland. He had not seen his
family in ve years. He intended to return to Paris, where Suzanne
awaited him, but restrictions had been placed on resident aliens
owing to severe shortages in France. Beckett then volunteered to
help build a hospital in Saint-L, a project arranged by both the Irish
and French Red Cross. Only after this did he return to his apartment
and begin his siege in the room, the prodigious outpouring of
work for which he was to achieve an international reputation.
The same altruistic impulses that had motivated Becketts earlier
Resistance activities prompted him to join the ranks in Saint-L.
Although he performed the most menial and boring of tasks, everything he did was in the service of rebuilding and healing. Saint-L
gave Beckett the opportunity to continue his previous activities in
the service of humanity, a logical extension and perhaps a consummation of his prewar and war experiences. Beckett was determined
to battle suering, whether this involved combating an evil invading
force or alleviating the destruction caused by friendly re.
He would now become a healer, an active participant in the restoration of one of the postwar ruins of the world. He would again wear
the uniform of the medical assistant, the orderlys dress, which he
had worn more than ten years before when he worked at the mental
hospital in London. Indeed, at this time in history, the world might
well have seemed a madhouse without walls. In addition, as a onetime Irish exile now working with an Irish group in France, Beckett
50
could connect his past with the nation that was to become his future,
permanent home.
The Allied invasion of Saint-L was possibly the most momentous epoch in [humanitys] annals. The once-beautiful Saint-L,
now a grotesque funeral pyre, was a charred and broken world, every
landmark transmuted into ash. The Saint-Lois had illustrated the
combination of human misery and human resiliencethe absurd
victorythat Beckett would shortly write about. The townspeople
had achieved liberation through unspeakable suering. They had
sustained the bizarre paradox of a relatively peaceful, if humiliating,
enemy occupation, followed by a destructive, if liberating, victory.
Gratitude at salvation, freedom gained at the cost of incomprehensible despair, would be an ingredient of Becketts future tragicomedy:
a gloss, perhaps, on Luckys lucky relationship to the brutal Pozzo
in Godot.
Ultimately, Becketts experience in Saint-L provided him with a
long-awaited equanimity, in a larger, metaphysical sense. It gave him
a sense of balance, of what in Godot he would call the tears and
laughter of the worldthe black-comic alternation of elation and
despair that is the individuals lot, as well as the nature of history.
Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man denes
Aristotles pity in tragic emotion as the feeling which arrests the
mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human
suerings and unites it with the human suerer. He then denes
the accompanying fear in tragic emotion as the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in
human suerings and unites it with the secret cause. Joyces distinction between pity for the suerer and fear for the cause
might well have been the terms of reference with which Beckett long
identied. But in Saint-L, I suggest, he witnessed a living example
of the human capacity both for destructiveness and for stoical forbearance, courage, humanity, and even humor in the face of brutal
forces. It must also have stirred resonances within him of what he
51
had rst seen as a youth in Dublin and Belfast and later, as an adult,
in London, Germany, and wartime France.
Beckett arrived in Saint-L at the beginning of the construction
project. The workers were to build one hundred makeshift wooden
huts to be used for hospital facilities; they would plant owers
and trees. The patients were survivors of bombings and concentration camps, and all suered from tuberculosis and the diseases of
wartime.
When the supplies arrived174 tons of equipment, including six
ambulances, a utility wagon and lorry, and medications like penicillin and blood serumBecketts rst tasks included picking them
up; he also drove sta to and from various destinations and did
whatever was called for. He performed all his duties with enthusiasm and generosity. He met new arrivals from Ireland in Dieppe in
his large Ford V-8 utility wagon and drove them to Saint-L; he
greeted them with enormous bags of plums, grapes, and pears.
When more supplies arrived, Beckett worked alongside both local
laborers and the one thousand German POWs on loan from the
French government; in fact, he wore the same uniform the prisoners
did. They sorted, stacked, and made stock cards for the 250 tons of
supplies that had arrived. Becketts activities in Saint-L, as described by those who worked with him, attest to those attributes that
became associated with him for the rest of his life: generosity, kindness, a sense of responsibility, and modesty. Jim Ganey, an attending physician, described Becketts general caring and good nature:
[Beckett] is a most valuable asset to the unitterribly conscientious
about his work and enthusiastic about the future of the hospital; [he]
like[s] a game of bridge and in every way [is] a most likeable chap,
aged abut [sic] 3840, [of ] no religious persuasion; I should say a
free thinkerbut he pounced on a little rosary beads which was on a
stall in Notre Dame to bring back as a little present to Tommy D. It
was very thoughtful of him.
After Beckett returned to Paris, his great creative siege began. He
52
wrote the radio speech The Capital of the Ruins (June 10, 1946), occasioned by Dublin press coverage of Frances ostensible lack of appreciation of the Irish eort in Saint-L. Becketts intention, clearly
reconciliatory, was to praise both the French and Irish. His decision
to make a public statement, however, exceptional for this man, and
the nature of that statement deserve close inspection, for Beckett is
atypically explicit in his personal and philosophical reections. We
know in retrospect that the end of the war marked a major turning
point in his life. In this speech, Beckett went beyond the Saint-L
experience to express a vision derived from his entire life thus far. He
would later say that he wrote from impotence and ignorance, but
there is a sense here of his wisdom and self-condence. Perhaps for
just this moment Beckett experienced a sense of knowing and a
conviction of his own courage. Perhaps these were to be the foundation for his retreat to the room, during which he engaged the world of
his imagination. Beckett was forty when he wrote the speech.
In this beautiful and moving statement, Beckett exalts both the
comfort to be drawn from the inward human capacity to surmount
circumstances of the utmost gravity and the sustenance to be given
and gained in moments of camaraderie. In addition, he sets forth
several articles of faith that will resonate throughout his great works
to come. The rst is his awareness of the human capacity to endure
the caprices of circumstance: What was important was not our
having penicillin . . . [but] the occasional glimpse obtained, by us in
them [the patients] and, who knows, by them in us . . . of that smile at
the human condition as little to be extinguished by bombs as to be
broadened by the elixirs of Burroughes and Welcome, the smile
deriding, among other things, the having and not having, the giving
and the taking, sickness and health. The smile deriding . . . the
having and not having would become, in Waiting for Godot, that
which enables humanity to face the fact that the tears of the world
are a constant quantity. The smile also enables the consolation one
derives from the corollary truth: The same is true of the laugh.
53
Becketts second point seems to be that while the material universe is provisional and ephemeral, acts of mundane generosity are
not: The hospital of wooden huts and its gardens between the Vire
and Bayeux roads will continue to discharge its function, and its
cured. Provisional is not the term it was in this universe become
provisional. It will continue to discharge its function long after the
Irish are gone. Beckett seems to be extolling the human impulse to
give of oneself to the suering. It is this that is a steadfast thread in
the human fabric, an aspect of life that is not provisional. Implicit in
this remark is Becketts contrast between the abiding nature of the
human spirit and the transitory trappings of worldly power, between
the permanence of generosity and the impermanent edices of the
material world. Also implicit here is his faith, as he again writes
in Waiting for Godot, that regardless of circumstance, humanity
will represent worthily the foul brood to which a cruel fate consigned us.
In perhaps his most optimistic statement, Beckett declares that
the act of giving uplifts the giver as well as the recipient: Those who
were in Saint-L will come home realising that they got at least as
good as they gave. This may be our salvation as we await Godot.
Beckett would proceed to evoke artistically increasingly sparse
human habitations, and his worlds and its gures would seem to
pale in comparison with, say, Joyces grand invocations of human
possibility. But Beckett, perhaps more so than Joyce, had come to
understand the limitations imposed upon the individual by powerful
and eternally unpredictable inner and outer forcesthat is, the limits posed by the absurdity of the human condition. In this remarkable radio speech, Beckett denes what we will come to intuit in his
later work as lifes redeeming virtues. The individuals fate may be
provisional and the course of history may be provisional, but the
smile that derides the conditional is not. Its source is in the human
spirit, and from this come healers of a moment: those who build
hospitals, those who dance a jig, and those who would entertain a
54
reader. The hospitals, like the dancers and the names of ctional
characters, will fade, just as the names of the ordinary Irish and
French patriots will be forgottenbut the spirit that moves them
will not.
Finally, as a man of specic place and originalways rooted in
this world and certainly not an artist-would-be-god or an unworldly
aestheteBeckett stresses that the Irish in Saint-L demonstrated
the best part of human nature, that quality that seeks not to dominate or desolate but rather to heal and console. With evident Irish
pride he adds, I think that to the end of its hospital days, it will be
called the Irish Hospital, and after that the huts, when they have
been turned into dwellings, the Irish huts.
At the end of the speech, revealing what was perhaps for him the
crucial wisdom that would direct his future work, he adds, I may
perhaps venture to mention another [possibility], more remote but
perhaps of greater import . . . the possibility that [those in Saint-L] . . .
got indeed what they could hardly give, a vision and sense of a timehonoured concept of humanity in ruins, and perhaps even an inkling of
the terms in which our condition is to be thought again. These will have
been in France (emphasis added). The willingness to give of oneself
to the suering is not only an abiding part of human nature. It is also
the very means through which one can gain an inkling of the
mystery of the human condition.
When Beckett wrote this speech, he had already resigned his post
at Saint-L and was settled in Paris. The speech was thus one of his
earliest postwar writings. Indeed, his earlier remark about the endurance of the Irish spirit and his nal reminder that these lessons
will have been consummated in France reconcile the land of his
origin with the land of his destiny. In addressing our condition . . .
to be thought again, Beckett braced himself for the great creative
task now facing him. Waiting for Godot would follow shortly.

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What are some of the themes Beckett explores in his work?

What are some of the themes Beckett explores in his work?

What did Beckett learn from his time in Saint-Lô during World War 2?

What did Beckett learn from his time in Saint-Lô during World War 2?

LOIS GORDON

introduction The Form of Madness: A Sensible Mess

The First Forty Years: Origins of a Vision and Form

Waiting for Godot: The Existential Dimension

The Dream as a Manifestation of Unconscious Language

The Conglomerative Voice: Cain and Abel

The Language of Dreams: The Anatomy of the

The key word is . . . perhaps

Staging the Conglomerative Eect

Crystallization of a Vision and Form

Acknowledging those who have helped me with my work on Samuel

in part, on the production notebooks in the Beckett Archive at the

The Form of Madness: A Sensible Mess

One cannot speak anymore of being, one must speak only of

In the premodern era, religion explained both human nature and

paradigms of Western thought, and although their inuence has

ubiquitous forces of unreason break the fragile veneer of reason and

state would seem to be one of alienation and disaection, where

and if cosmic absurdity mocks all pretenses to moral certainty, then

ponents of self, (2) language as a means of constructing reality, and

conscious and unconscious thinking.

O Broadway. The undisputed realization of a major new dramatic

idiom, and his innovative staging and linguistic arrangements give

ence. . . . It is there and it must be allowed. . . . To nd a form that

stand the self or world, in spite of the Berkeleyan, Kantian, and

In the main, however, Becketts work focuses on the feeling of

tion and were quests for both meaning and wholeness.

The First Forty Years, 190646:

the first forty years

the first forty years

retained vivid memories of the uprising throughout his life. His

the first forty years

school, Portora, had been considerably changed by the recent wars.

the first forty years

brother was ghting brother, anticipating the internecine rivalries

the first forty years

shows, and Czanne was an artist whose pictorial innovations would

the first forty years

analysis promised an inner coherence to ll the personal or cosmic

the first forty years

nal disintegration in the very act of measuring itself. Each of his

the first forty years

the first forty years

the first forty years

profoundly humanitarian bent; he was also, to the surprise of many,

the first forty years

the first forty years

depth studies of A la recherche; many of its remarks are reected in

the first forty years

the first forty years

mary. Experimenting with opacity and the diusion of linearity, he

the first forty years

contemporaneous-with-death, were frequently painted at twilight.

the first forty years

the first forty years