New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett (9781316242537) by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge Univ Pr
Published: 2014-12-07T16:00:00+00:00

Beckett and Geulincx

These ideas can be clarified by considering Beckett’s intertextual relationship with the obscure seventeenth-century Flemish philosopher Arnold Geulincx. Beckett’s notes to his reading of Geulincx were among the first made available to scholars through the Trinity Archives in 2001.

At that time only a few critics had attempted to engage with Beckett and Geulincx; the field as a whole had been hampered from doing so because no English language translation of Geulincx’s Ethics was available. This point itself is no doubt telling with regard to Beckett’s use of intertextual material. The work is obscure and only available in Latin, and there is something about obscurity that he finds, at least intuitively, interesting. He writes to Thomas MacGreevy in 1936:

I have been reading Geulincx in TCD, without knowing why exactly. Perhaps because the text is so hard to come by. But that is rationalization & my instinct is right & the work worth doing, because of its saturation in the conviction that the sub specie aetenitatis [Latin: from the perspective of eternity] vision is the only excuse for remaining alive. He does not put out his eyes on that account, as Heraclites did & Rimbaud began to, nor like the terrified Berkeley repudiate them. One feels them very patiently turned outward, & without Schwärmerei [German: enthusiasm] turned in-ward.

(LSB I 318–19)

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