Samuel Beckett, a Critical Study by Hugh Kenner

Author:Hugh Kenner [Kenner, Hugh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: French, General, Drama, Literary Criticism, English; Irish; Scottish; Welsh, European
ISBN: 9780520006416
Google: i4nJoTcjmR8C
Amazon: 0520006410
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 1973-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

more numerous even than the infinitely numerous rationals. And it is in the analogy between these interpenetrating but incommensurable domains that Beckett discerns his central analogy for the artist's work and the human condition. ("There somewhere man is too, vast conglomerate of all of nature's kingdoms, as lonely and as bound.") As the Molloy domain is to the Moran, as that of the irrational numbers is to that of the rational, so the clown's is to the citizen's. The clown's role is a furtive enactment of all that orderly behavior will never attain to. He is sometimes wistful, more often in the Beckett landscape self-sufficient, always elusive, trapped between converging limits but never bound. The very shape of the Beckett plots, as Vivian Mercier has brilliantly noted, 9 can be prescribed by equations, Cartesian Man's inflexible oracles; Watt's career the curve of a function that approaches and turns around zero ( Knott) before disappearing irretrievably off the paper, The Unnamable perhaps a spiral confined to the third quadrant where both coordinates are negative, and capable of straightening out and blending with zero if only it can protract itself to infinity.

The processes of mathematics offer themselves to the Beckett protagonists as a bridge into number's realm of the spectrally perfect, where enmired existence may be annihilated by essence utterly declared. Let a calculation get under way, let but a waft of mathematical terminology pass across the page, and the unpurged images of day recede. At least it is reasonable to expect that they will, but Beckett's is a world of anticlimax. It is a true that Arsene nearly succeeds in freezing gluttony into a formal composition with the merest touch of Euclidean symmetry:

____________________ 9 "The Mathematical Limit," in The Nation, Feb. 14, 1959, 144.

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