Samuel Beckett by Pascale Casanova

Author:Pascale Casanova
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

This strange, contradictory solution draws on Descartes and Leibniz as well as Spinoza. In cases of the most extreme compulsion, Geulincx granted a certain indetermination that is the sole tragic space of freedom – an intellectual, solitary and autarkic freedom giving access neither to the body nor to the world: ‘The passenger can move about the boat. But the latter pursues its course regardless.’16

Beckett would seek to illustrate Geulincx’s system of mutual externality very precisely, by conveying it in literary form with the introduction of the indolent, nonchalant character from Dante’s Purgatorio, Belacqua. An exact embodiment of the principle of inaction stated by Geulincx, he also allowed Beckett to represent the main paradox of freedom under constraints: ‘This was his Belacqua fantasy and perhaps the most highly systematized of the whole collection. It belonged to those that lay just beyond the frontiers of suffering, it was the first landscape of freedom.’17 This novelistic use of Geulincx’s idealist scepticism was neither formalist, nor directly literary: Beckett discovered in Geulincx’s system a formulation of his own intellectual, national, literary, social and psychological confinement and a tool for understanding it. And that in turn enabled him to implement new narrative solutions.

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