CHAPTER-I

BECKETT'S DEBTS OF INHERITANCE

An attempt to introduce Samuel Beckett as a writer is

doomed to be frustrating, because the whole corpus of his

works which includes poetry, fiction, criticism and drama

would definitely be frightening to any explorer, not simply

for its range, but mainly for the inscrutable profundity of

the mind that is buried in it. Moreover, on every genre which

Beckett chose to absorb and reshape he leaves the imprint of

his prodigious talent. His works reveal an intellectual orien­

tation enriched by the European philosophical andliterary tra­

ditions : he has assimilated not only the mythological-religi­

ous response to life, but also the historical-materialist res­

ponse, with the purpose of reconstructing it in art. But simul­

taneously, Beckett has shown his orientation to the subjective,

idealist tradition of the 20th-century philosophy of Existen­

tialism. This tradition asserted its influence in the inter-war

period, and since then, became the most seminal literary tradi­

tion of the modern times, because the rich harvest of the works

of Proust, Kafka, Camus, Joyce and Sartre, along with those of

Beckett, belongs to this tradition.

What binds these writers together as one group is the

general world-view, grown out of their diverse responses to

2

the post-war scenario of life which include some attitudes

and insights common to all of them. They have tried to rein­

terpret the human situation in relation to the universe, God,

nature and the society of men from an existentialist angle.

Beckett•s fiction reveals a passion for interpreting the

basic human situation from the point of view of one who

observes the stream of individual consciousness in his chara­

cters. The progress of these characters as pilgrims for truth

and mystery of life charts the universal human response to the

absurdity of the world.

Secondly, all these writers are the inheritors of a re­

vival of interest in man which owes much to the confluence of

modern thoughts in post-war Europe.

Thirdly, all these writers including Beckett in their

works reflect an affinity in their exploration of the basic

predicament of man, since they focus on the alienation of

modern individuals.

Lastly, these writers seem to be seriously occupied with

the problem of communication through rational and sequential

linguistic order.

What differentiates Beckett from these writers iS his

insistence on the quest for truth about the core of human exis­

tence, the origin, the flowering and the dissolution of consci­

eusness. He even probes deeper beyond the level of conscious­

ness. Unlike these modern literary practitioners, Beckett

3

throws into focus the inescapable human situation, the angu­

ish of the human self trapped in his existence, and the impo­

ssibility of purposeful action in an absurd, disorderly world.

While these writers highlight the social relationships of in­

dividuals, their pursuit of passion or of wealth and power,

Beckett concentrates on the essential aspect of human exper­

ience. Unlike Beckett, these writers turn out to be the explo­

rers of the circumferential aspects of human life which serve

to mask the basic anguish of human existence. The essential

human situation shorn of all the external trappings is there­

fore the general theme in an absurd world.

The study of Beckett's philosophy will inevitably entail

a study of the whole philosophical tradition of Europe right

from the 17th century down to the later phase of the 20th

century. What Beckett shares with the philosophers such as

Zeno, Descartes, Geulincx, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzs­

che, Heidegger, Camus and Sartre, he has made his own by trans­

forming it into art. What L.A.C. Dobrez in his essay titled

"Beckett : the philosophical tradition" asserts is relevant

here :

If one can say that Beckett's novels often illus­

trated in miniature the novel's historical deve-

lopment from the picaresque to the psychological

and beyond, one can with even more justification

argue that Beckett's work as a whole represents

nothing less than a literary recapitulation of

an entire tradition in philosophy from Descartes

and his contemporaries to the present day or, more

specifically, from the rationalist stream of the

seventeenth century to the Idealists and finally

to the existential movement1 •

4

This approach to Beckett's works in terms of 'a literary re­

capitulation of an entire tradition in philosophy' is valid

because, what philosophies Beckett absorbed from the whole in­

tellectual climate of modern times and whatever philosophical

orientation Beckett's works project, do not interfere with his

artistic creation. Indeed,all his debts of inheritance to

modern thought in terms of myth, philosophy, history, politics,

science, anthropology, nuclear war, etc., have enriched his

artistic vision and creative style. Whereas in Jean-Paul

Sartre's work the author as the existentialist philosopher and

the artist (i.e. the novelist, the playwright etc.) are indis­

tinguishable, in Beckett it is the philosophy of an artist

that predominates. The works of Sartre, the existentialist

philosopher, and Sartre, the dramatist or novelist, are so

homogeneous that the artist and the philosopher are inextri­

cable, because Sartre expresses his philosophy also through

his novels and plays. But in Beckett if there is any philoso­

phy it is only one component of his total vision of life which

is expressed in his works of art. In this conn&tion, Beckett's

own assertion regarding this position as an artist is relevant

here, which he disclosed to Tom Driver :

When Heidegger and Sartre speak of a contrast bet­

ween being and existence, they may be right. I

don't know, but their language is too philosophi­

cal for me. I am not a philosopher2

•

5

Philosophy is inseparable from thought, and Beckett brings in­

to focus the stream of thought which is an index to the living­

ness of the living mind. In the process, the individual's con­

sciousness of being in this world is registered, and thus phi­

losophy is interwoven with expression of art-forms in Beckett's

work.

As already stated in the Pr€face ·, the present study

is an analysis of Beckett's fiction which seems to offer elu­

sive glimpses of individual consciousness mostly along linear

time, of individual mind ( the microcosm ) in its interaction

with the world (the macrocosm).

II

What links Camus with Beckett is their projection of n-'ian

as a 'helpless victim of his ontological fate'. Beckett's ex-

periences as a participant in the Resistance Movement during

the German occupation of France did not inspire him to write

about the heroism of the people fighting against Hitler, be-

cause he was, as he said, 'not interested in stories of

6

3 success, oaly failure' • In this respect what Dr Rieuxstates

in Camus' The Plague is strikingly similar to Beckett's

approach :

I feel more fellowship with the defeated than with

saints. Heroism and sanctity don't really appeal

to me ••• what interests me is ---being a man4

•

This point of affinity between Camus and Beckett brings in

association series of characters in Camus• and Beckett's works

who are variations of modern anti-heroes, the successors to

Camus• Sisyphus. Camus• interpretation of the situation of

Sisyphus in The Myth of Sisyphus in the light of the philosQthy

of existentialism and the absurdity of human existence is a

milestone in the evolution of modern thought. The salient as-

pects of the situation of Sisyphus are : the consciousness of

being trapped in a tragic situation, the sorrows revived by

memory, the wretchedness of defeat and the inevitability of

degeneration and death as the nemesis for being born in this

world. This tragedy becomes all the more poignant in the face

of the stark loneliness of being in the world of being doomed , to alienation. As Camus says 'that Sisyphus is the absurd

hero' engaged in a futile 'effort of a body straining to

raise the huge stone, to roll it and push it up to a slope a

5 hundred times over' is actually the very symbol of a futile

and fruitless action 'measured by skyless space and time with­

out depth''6

• The stone which becomes part of the life of the

7

mythical Sisyphus symbolically assimilates man's conscious-

ness of life as a burden of inescapable sufferings. But in

this very consciousness Sisyphus becomes •superior to his I

fate' and •stronger than his rock'. Camus further adds : If

this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious •

••• Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every stage 1 7

the hope of succeeding upheld him •

As Oedipus unknowingly obeyed fate and therefore did

not suffer till the awakening of the consciousness of what

he committed , the mythical Sisyphus too enjoyed happiness

unconscious of his actions, because 'from the moment he knows

8 his tragedy begins 1 • The human situation becomes tragic only

after human consciousness and knowledge link man to the absurd

world, particularly the knowledge of fruitless exercise in a

sterile situation and damnation in respect of existence as a

prison of time and space. The knowledge that there is no high-

er destiny and that death and defeat are inevitable compels

the individual to the act of contemplation and the revival of

memory of time past; memory also is a precondition for such a

doom, since memory cannot offer true freedom or any kind of

relief --- except the occasional relief of reminiscence of

past happiness --- from the inescapable existential anguish.

In this context what Samuel Beckett asserts in his essay on

Proust is relevant here :

For the purposes of this synthesis it is con-

venient to adopt the inner chronology of the

Proustian demonstration, and to examine in the

first place that double-headed monster of dam-

9 nation and salvation --- Time •

8

Consciousness of time regulating human thought of be-

ing and nothingness is a phenomenon reflected in the charact-

ers of Beckett --- a phenomenon which can also be traced in

Camus• characters confronting time present and death as in-

escapable realities. What Dr Rieux in The Plague contemplates

is remarkably analogical as an attitude common to Camus• and

Beckett's characters : 'It was undoubtedly the feeling of

exile --- the sensation of a void within which never left us,

that irrational longing to hark back to past or else to speed

up the march of time, and those keen shafts of memory that

stung like fire•10

• It is a response of the alienated indivi-

dual to the claustrophobic situation of objective life. The

culmination of such an attitude is found in Meursault in The

Outsider through the consciousness of the absurd estrangement

of the character from his mother in the context of her death

and funeral. Strangely, Molloy in Beckett's novel begins his

exploration of the consciousness of being by reverting to the

concept of mother as a quest for truth in his onward journey.

This search for truth persists in almost all the novels of

Beckett as a crusade of the individual in his attempt to trace

his consciousness in its very origin, as evident with reference

9

to the claustrophobic 'caul' ruminating on his birth and

his mother. What Malone in Malone Dies thinks as 'a strang-

er to the joys of darkness' is also a striking analogy to

the reflections of Camus' anti-hero in The Outsider :

Then he was sorry he had not learnt the art of

thinking, beginning by folding back the second

and third fingers the better to put the index

on the subject and the little finger on the verb,

in the way his teacher had shown him and sorry

he could make no meaning of the babel raging in

his head, the doubts, desires, imaginings and

dreads. And a little less well endowed with

strength and courage he too would have abandon-

ed and despaired of ever knowing what manner of

being he was and how he was going to live, and

lived vanquished, blindly in a mad world, in the

11 midst of strangers •

While &eckett's characters are determined to solve the

riddles concerning their identity, not by taking refuge in

mysticism but by seeking the help of rationality~since man can

face absurdity with the shield of rationality alone, Camus'

characters try to conquer absurdity by moving towards the

counter-idea of revolt since man can create without any help

from God his own values. What Dr Rieux asserts is a means of

overcoming the absurdity of an alienated consciousness :

That all men die is a problem we can do very

little about, but all men oppressed is a con­

dition we can ameliorate12

•

10

Again, in The Rebel Camus' hero is encouraged by the possi-

bility of collective endeavour or of a sense of solidarity in

suffering through sharing :

In an absurd world the rebel has still one cer-

tainty; it is the solidarity of men in the same

advEnture, the fact that the grocer and he are

13 both oppressed •

Though consciousness is the main focus in Camus' and

Beckett's novels, it is mostly the social consciousness of an

individual trapped in an absurd world which is the overriding

issue among Camus• novels in the progression of thought. On

the contrary, what Beckett projects through his characters is

the consciousness of an individual outside the socio-political

milieu, apparently, engaged in a struggle to liberate himself

from the claustrophobic world.

Problem of communication impelled Beckett as an obses-

sion, so much so that it goaded him to various modes of exper-

!mentation with language and its syntax. Sometimes, as in

Waiting for Godot, the absurdity at the core of existence is

expressed in terms of a new syntactical order to mirror the

11

disorder or lack of patterR and logic in this world. Lucky's

tirades which are marked by 'logorrhoea' actually recapture,

through the disruption of syRtactical order, the void and the

disorder of the world. In this coRn~~ion what Ruby Cohn finds

out is quite revealing :

In Beckett's work, coherence is jarred at every

level --- the cosmos, the plot, the person, the

sentence. In the "wordy-gurdy" of his protagonists")

monologues, we are persuaded by our dizziness of

his heroes• authenticity. They know no respect

for time or place; they disdain sequence and pro­

portion. But they must not be too readily confus-

ed with their creator. Unlike Sartre and Camus,

who paint an absurd world in logical word and

syntax, Beckett strives for a more mimetic art.

Cosmic absurdity is reflected by non-concatenation

of incidents~ as in the fiction of Kafka; personal

disintegration is reflected by syntactical frag-

14 mentation, as in the drama of Ionesco •

III

Nine years after Marcel Proust's death Beckett's mono-

graph on Proust was published (1931), which Beckett wrote with

a measure of detachment, since he had no personal relationship

with Proust as he had with Joyce. Melvin J. Friedman's comment

on Beckett's assessment of Proust is illuminating as a clue to,

12

and as a turning point in, Beckett's career as a literary

critic; Friedman viewed this essay as an exercise 1 rather

like entering through a forbidden back-staircase,an approach

which has always tempted him'15

•

Since Beckett's essay ?roust was on the French writ-

er's ~n searcb of Lost Time) novel, A la recherche du temps

perdu, the critical analysis entailed the reading of all the

sixteen volumes of Nouvella Revue of Frangoise edition. This

essay is a monumental work in that brief as it is, it encapsu-

lates Beckett's understanding of.the variegated genius of

Proust, while at the same time it focusses on Beckett's affi-

nity with Proust and also on the interest generated in him by

Proust's single voluminous novel. Actually what Beckett explor­

ed in Proust was the outcome of his own interpretation of

Proust's achievement. That is why what R.N.Coe observes on

Beckett's Proust seems to be undoubtedly relevant to Beckett's

own work :

Its style is jejune in the extreme, a tapestry of

academic bun mots decorated with cornucopia of

metaphors; however , discarding this tiresome ver-

biage and discounting the occasional platitude,

Proust reveals itself not only as one of the first

really serious analyses in depth of A la recherche

du temps perdu, but as a sort of preview of almost

all the main themes in Beckett's later work16 •

13

While rereading Beckett's monograph on Proust in the

light of the novels Beckett wrote later, one discovers that

Beckett was perhaps writing as much about the future shape of

his novels as about the French novelist. In this connection

Frederick J. Hoffman's (Samuel Beckett : The Man and His Works,

p. 82) observation on Proust is significant : instead of con-

sidering Beckett's critical acumen in this essay he considers

it as 'a prolegomenon to the novels and plays (of Beckett) to

come• 17 • Just as Andre Gide discovered his own creative self

while writing his monograph on Dostoevsky, or as Thomas Mann

offered a new glimpse of his own creative self in his work on

Goethe, Beckett seems to have absorbed both creative power,

aesthetic vision and a literary technique from Proust a~ also

from Joyce.

What Beckett noticed in Proust's style was actually a

mode of concentration of metaphor which Beckett defined as

follows

The Proustian world is expressed metaphorically

by the artisan because it is apprehended meta-

phorically by the artist : the indirect and com•

parative expression of indirect and comparative

perception. The rhetorical equivalent of the

Proustian real is the chain figure of the meta:-

18 phor •

The examples Beckett himself chooses from Proust in

Beckett's own translation may be pertinent here. Proust

14

defines love as 'Time and space made perceptible to the

heart•. The second example from Proust relates to the des-

cription of the suffering of the lover engaged in a strenuous

attempt at forgetting Albertine, the beloved , 'The lion of

my love trembled before the python of forgetfulness'. Strik-

ingly, what Beckett discovers as 'the rhetorical equivalent

of Proustian real' in terms of series of metaphors or as com-

ponents of metaphors may be treated also as the 'rhetorical

equivalent' of Beckettian reality. In Molloy the hero as narra­

tor tries to describe a situation but the attempt is thwarted

when he tries to describe the scenario realistically. Though he

begins with the characters named 'A' and 'C', in the process of

narration/invention they change, and the landscape gets trans-

formed :

So I saw A and C going slowly towards each other

unconscious of what they were doing. It was on a

road remarkably bare. I mean without hedges or

ditches or any kind of edge, in the country, for

cows were chewing in enormous fields, lying and

standing, in the evening silence. Perhaps I'm

inventing a little perhaps embellishing, but on

the whole that's the way it was. They chew,

swallow, they after a short pause effortlessly

bring up the next mouthful. A neck muscle stirs

and the jaws begin to grind again. But perhaps

19 I'm remembering things •

15

When Molloy again tries to recapture the origin of his con-

sciousness with reference to his mother, the very act of re-

capturing becomes a metaphor, rather unconsciously and invol-

untarily; "cursed taste of the shit". Actually, this is the

significant aspect of Beckett's Proustian legacy, which

Beckett tried to absorb and express in his own fiction. The

startling point of Proust's distinction, however, as Beckett

himself notes, is the series of images in Proust which have

an approximation to the world of vegetation :

It is significant that the majority of his

images are botanical. He assimilates the

human to the vegetal. He is conscious of

humanity as flora, never as fauna. There is

20 no black cats and faithful hounds in Proust •

What Beckett infers in his approach to Proust's work is also a

direction to the readers of Beckett : 1Here, as always, Proust

is completely detached from all moral consideration. There is

no right and wrong in Proust nor in his world 121 • Beckett him-

self adopts a mode of detachment in his novels in which his

heroes or other characters appear to be spectators. Moreover,

Beckett does not show any particular interest in any sort of

mythical, historical, religious, social and ethical aspects of

life, since all these issues stand away from the central prob-

lem of his exploration of human consciousness operating through

human existence. That is why Beckett's characters are also in-

different to the ethical or moral issues in their lives.

16

Probably Beckett inherited his detachment and amoral atti­

tude from Proust.

This affinity in terms of the attitude of detach­

ment can be best understood in the context of the characters

created by both the novelists. Proust'scharacters are in a

sense the predecessors of Beckettian antiheroes. Beckett's

insight into Proust's technique of characterization is actu­

ally an amplification of the existentialist situation con­

fronted by Beckett's creatures, representing the tragic neme­

sis for the 'sin of having been born'.

The essential issues which Beckett discovered in

Proust offer other points of affinity between Beckett and

Proust; for instance, Beckett elaborately discussed Proust's

concepts of time, the role of memory, and also the function

of habit as a mental exercise. These three concepts are ana­

lysed by Beckett as formulation of the Proustian principle.

Time, Habit and Memory, in a sense, are manifestations of the

subjective awareness of the perceiver in relation to the world

perceived. Thus all these three issues may also be considered

as functions of the human mind and consciousness. What one

finds in Beckett's novels is a stream-like progression of

thought or consciousness along linear time, which also may in­

clude thoughts about~ time past, i.e. memory. What Virginia

Woolf categorizes as 'linear time' and 'mind time' are actu­

ally the variations of progression in time, inclusive of

17

shifts in time, from past to present and from present to

future or otherwise. What Beckett interprets as the Proust-

ian concept of time as 'a double-headed monster', a pendulum

bringing damnation and salvation, is actually a formulation

of Beckett's own concept of time as viewed through the con-

sciousness of his characters. For example, Malone's consci-

ousness continues to flow at a crucial moment of his exist-

ence :

Dead world, airless, waterless.

That's it, reminisce.

- - - - - - - - - - -In the old days I used to count, up to three

hundred, four hundred, and with other thing

too, the showers, the bells, the chatter of

the sparrows at dawn, or with nothing, for

no reason, for the sake of counting, and then

I divided, by sixty. That passed the time,

I was time, I devoured the world. Not now, any

22 more. A man changes, As he gets on •

Beckett in his essay Proust interprets Proust's chronology as

Dostoievskian, since the plot is marked by a ' spasmodic' se-

quence of events, with characters (and also themes) obeying

'an almost insane inward necessity'. The point is clarified

further by Beckett when he tries to summarize Proust's artis-

tic mode : 'In time creative and destructive Proust discovers

18

f . ,23 . . i himsel as an art1st • Memory as an exerc1se 1n consc ous-

ness of time past actually regulates human thought. Since

consciousness is inconceivable in isolation from time, human

consciousness gets inextricably related to consciousness of

being in time, from time past to present and to future. In

Beckett's fiction and also in his plays the burden of exis-

tential angst is proved to be insupportable without the sus-

tenance derived from the recollection of time past; otherwise

one cannot go on living after the knowledge of Sisyphian fut~

lity in the face of the horror of nothingness and void in this

godless universe. Thus memory not only regulates human thought

in Beckett's works but also regulates man's existence. The

affinity between Beckett and Proust in this respect may be

highlighted with reference to Beckett's play Krapp's Last Tape

and Proust's novel A la recherche du temps perdu; the point of

view from which the Marcel of past time objectively confronts

the Marcel who grows old in course of the narrative is actually

paralleled in Beckett's representation of Krapp's recollection

of the past moments of happiness in love, seen from the dis-

tance of the time present. What Richard Macksey observes with

reference to Proust's narrative technique may be applied to

Beckett's style of representation too :

Thus the action can be linked to an Odyssey or

pilgrimage where the traveller in time has for-

gotten the location of the homeland or the sig­

nificance of the shrine24

•

19

Beckett's characters, Molloy, Malone, the Unnamable and the

hero of How it is are all lost in the bleak world of 'mind

time'. They want to escape time, though any hope of escape is

an impossibility. Eugene Webb observes an analogy between

Proust and Beckett's points of view :

For Proust, as for Beckett, life in the temp-

oral world, except when one's awareness of it

is deadened by habit --- 'Habit is a great

deadener'~ says Didi in Waiting for Godot

25 --- is largely painful •

Habit is not only man's second nature, Beckett clari-

fies in Proust, "Life is habit". One's true self lies behind

habit. When one switches over from one habit to another one's

true self comes out during this shift. Beckett clarifies fur-

ther the concepts of memory and habit in Proust, when he says

that "Memory and Habit are the attributes of Time-cancer" •

Since habit engenders the feeling of security and leads us to

a sense of identification with objects or interests or deeds,

it naturally builds up an image of our false personality and

itself becomes a hindrance to our quest for self or truth.

This point is amplified a little further by Beckett

From this Janal, trinal, agile monster or Divin-

i ty : Time ·- a condition of resurrection because

an instrument of death: Habit -- an infliction in

20

so far as it opposes the dangerous exalta-

tion of the one and a blessing in so far

as it palliates the cruelty of the other ;

Memory -- a clinical laboratory stocked with

poison and remedy, stimulant and sedative :

from Him the mind turns to the one compensa-

tion and miracle of evasion tolerated by His

.... i '1 26 ~yranny and v g~ ance •

Since breathing is a habit, so life is an extension of habits

in the time-scale of the conscious life of an individual. The

succession of habits may be an extension of the individual's

consciousness. Thus the world Beckett the creator perceives

as phenomenon is a construction of the mind , and the success-

ion of everyday orientation that habit enchains us to implies

Beckett's ( and also Proust's ) contempt for mechanisation or

automation of habitual exercise. The periods of transition

from one habit to another may initiate a change of habit which

again may lead to the discovery of real nature. Because the

action of habit "being precisely to hide the essence - the

idea" ceases during a period of transition and thus the seek-

er of truth may burrow into his mind for an answer. AS early

as 1931 he realizes that what is necessary is not only des-

truction of habitual forms of existence, but also the surren-

der of rational control. He surrenders himself totally to the

'disintegrating flux of time', unlike the classical author

who always attempts to control it :

The classical artist assumes omniscience and

omnipotence. He raises himself artificially

out of Time in order to give relief to his

chronology and causality to his development.

Proust's chronology is extremely difficult to

follow, the succession of events spasmodic, and

his characters and themes, although they seem

to obey an almost insane inward necessity, are

presented and developed with a fine Dostoie-

vskian contempt for the vulgarity of a plau­

sible concentration~ 7

21

But this relinquishment of control means a different

and latent control which is the 'almost insane inward necess-

ity' of Proust's writing. In his works Proust weaves round

his centr«l theme a fascinating tapestry of personal recoll-

ections in such a manner as to embrace the duration of a re-

trospective existence. The experimentation in Beckett's own

later works reveals both the dissolution of a narrative super-

structure and the ·obsessive 'inward necessity' of the mono-

logue. Thus Beckett draws upon the Proustian tradition of

weaving the fabric of consciousness in verbal forms only :

For Proust the quality of language is more

important than any system of ethics or aes­

thetics28.

22

Organic structure to Proust is neither an authentic virtue

nor an essential one in a novel. Proust's tricks of 'peti-

tes lf1rases • and leitmotifs and foreshadowings of the future

evolution of his characters are in fact tricks and clumsy

devices that make Proust an outcast from the tradition of

French literature. Here is an excerpt from By Way of Saint-

Beuve :

And if Guermantes does not disappoint one as

all imagined things do when reduced to reality,

this is undoubtedly because at no time is it a

real place, because even when one is walking

about in it, one feels that the things one sees

there are merely the wrappings of other things,

that reality lies, not in this present but for

elsewhere, that the stone under one's hand is

no more than a metaphor of time and the imagi-

nation feeds on Guermantes visited as it fed on

Guerrnantes described because all these things

are still only words, everything is a splendid

29 figure of speech that means something else •

In his search for reality Beckett, like Proust, peels off lay-

ers of apparent reality, and this process jars the coherence.

He is a follower of Proust, but he goes further than Proust

dares. No logical language or syntax is used in Beckett's

writing :

23

Last reasoning last figures number 777777

leaves number 777776 of his way unwriting

towards number 777778 finds the sack with-

out which he would not go far takes it un-

to himself and continues on his way the

same to be same to be taken by number 777776

in his turn and after him by number 777775

and so back to the unimaginable number. I

each one no sooner on his way than he finds

i i b h. . 30

the sack nd spensa le to 1s JOurney •

IV

In Samuel Beckett's universe James Joyce was the sun.

The most important spell of influence Beckett absorbed in his

artistic development was that of James Joyce. Beckett spent the

golden years of his life in France. After receiving his B.A.

degree from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1928, Beckett left Ire-

land for Paris to take the post of a lecturer in English at the

Ecole Normale superieure. During the first month of his sojourn

in Paris, Beckett met Joyce. He was simply awed by Joyce who

was so impressed by the handsome Irish young man that he

engaged him as the principal translator for the French version

24

of his Anna Livia Plurabelle, a section of Work in Progress.

Thus began the most memorable and fateful relationship, both

personal and literary, between Beckett and Joyce. Beckett

considered Joyce as the greatest among the writers of the

20th century. He wrote to McGrevy : "Joyce had a moral effect

h d 1 . t' ' . t ' n 31 Wh B k t on me, e rna e me rea lZe ar lStlC ln egrlty • en ec e t

was beginning to formulate his own ideas about writing, he

started to imitate not only the literary principles and style

of Joyce but also Joyce's mannerisms. In the prime of his

life Beckett was swallowed up by Joyce the writer as well as

Joyce the man. Beckett 'gave Joyce all the love and devotion

32. he gave to his own father' •

The issue of affinity between Beckett and Joyce has

acquired so much importance that quite a number of writers,

such as, M.J.Friedman, Hugh Kenner, Eugene Webb, Harry Vandru-

lis~ W.Y.Tindall, Ruby Cohn, Phyllis Carey and Ed Jewinski,

Deidre Bair, John Fletcher, Barbara Reich Gluck. have examin-

ed this aspect as Beckett's legacy of inheritance, from vari-

ous points. Abel Lionel's "Joyce the father: Beckett the son"

is an example of the basis of such interpretations. His curi-

ous essay on Joyce's Finnegans Wake, •our Exagmination', re-

fleeted Beckett's profound admiration for his idol who remain-

ed so as his hero throughout his life. He showed his contempt

for that section of i:he reading public who failed to appreciate

the genius of Joyce. He wrote, "And if you do not understand

it, ladies and gentleman, it is because you are too decadent

to receice it"~ 3 So Joyce became his model whose work

sustained his literary taste and guided him in "the grim

business of survival amidst uncertainties, ambiguities"::4

The manner in which Beckett introduces himself in

'Dante --- Bruno --- Vico ---Joyce' underscores his

consciousness of co~nitment to the Joycean pasture as the

fountain of sustenance for him as early as 1929 :

And now here am I, with my handful of

abstractions, among which notably : a

mountain, the coincidence of contraries,

the inevitability of cyclic evolution,

a system of Poetics, and the prospect of

self-extension in the world of Mr. Joyce's

35 'Work in Progress•.

25

In terms of "the prospect of self-extension in the world of

Mr. Joyce's 'work in Progress'", the creative phases of

Beckett's life may be established as both Joycean or Post-

Joycean work in progress by Beckett.

A study of the complex interaction of Beckett and

Joyce should take into account the 'danger' of neat

identifications with 'an exactitude of application' Beckett

warns us about :

26

Must we wring the neck of a certain system in

order to stuff it into a contemporary pigeon-hole,

or modify the dimension of that pigeon-hole for

the satisfaction of the analogymongers ? Literary

criticism is not book-keeping:6

From the beginning of his literary career Beckett was

highly fascinated by the modernist experiments in form and

style, and since Joyce was one of the most prominent innovators

of this experiment, Beckett was particularly impressed by what

he regarded as the perfect fusion of structure and content in

Joyce. He wrote admiringly of Joyce's Work in Progress :

Here form is content, content is form ••• His

writing is not about something ; it is that

37 something itself •

This formulation on Joyce is also an application of Beckett's

technique in his plays and novels. Waiting for Godot is the

example of the culmination of this technique of the fusion of

theme and structure; while the play objectifies •waiting•,

it orchestrates the theme in terms of the stage images of

waiting. In his mature novels which include his trilogy, this

assimilation of content and form has been achieved aesthetically.

27

It may be noted as a coincidence that both Joyce and

Beckett resolved to make a career of writing with poetry in

the first phase and an analytical essay on major literary

predecessors : essays on Ibsen by Joyce and on Proust by

Beckett are cases in point. Again, just as More Pricks than

~icks (1934),. the first endeavour of Beckett to write in the

prose form, presents a series of stories connected by a

common character, Dubliners (1914) is also Joyce's first

attempt at a series of short stories, united by a common theme.

More Pricks than kicks focusses on a chronological sequence

of Belacqua's life trom his student days to his burial. The

name of this 'anti-heroic' protagonist derives from the fourth

Canto of Dante's Purgatorio. Dante was one of the strongest

bonds between Joyce and Beckett. In this connedion what Aldo

Tagliaferri in the essay "Beckett and Joyce" asserts is not

fully acceptable :

The very concept of the Unnamable can be

I considered an offshoot of Ulysses' Nameless

One, and the enigmatic use of the letter M. 38

comes straight from Joyce.

Beckett might have consciously derived his concept of the

Unnamable from Joyce's Nameless One, though Beckett's

configuration of Consciousness as the Unnamable, which can

be differentiated frcm the Namable (which is dust), is

something unique and original. Moreover, what Tagliaferri

28

observes about Beckett's borrowing of the letter M.'straight

from Joyce• is sweeping, inadequate and partly wrong; since

the writer does not care to substantiate the point. More

probably, the use of the letter M., both in Joyce and in

Beckett, was a conscious legacy from Dante's Divine Comedy

which opens with the description of a journey (Inferno) thus:

Midway this way of life we're bound upon,

I woke to find myself in a dark wood,

where the right road was wholly lost and gone.

(Penguin edition of Canto I, 11 1-3,

translated by Dorothy L. Sayers)

There are several points of analogy between The

Divine Comedy and some sections of Ulysses in terms of

characterisation, aesthetic theory, technique - particularly

'Odyssey motif' -- and imagery. Beckett also absorbs many

elements from Dante, including figures and characters. In

terms of the Odyssey-motif, and of the visions of infernal

suffering as part of existential angst, Beckett reinterprets

Dante in More Pricks than Kicks.

In A Portrait of the Artist as a young n-..,_111 Stephen,

like Dante, dazzled by the light of Paradise and the

revelation of the celestial rose, feels himself •swooning

into some new world ••• A world, a glimmer, or a flower?

Glimmering and trembling, trembling and unfolding, a breaking

light, an opening flower ••• wave of light by wave of light,

29

flooding all the heavens with its soft flushes39

• Stephen

transforms Dante's divine 'claritas' into the radiance of

human experience. Thus Joyce appropriates Dante's religious

'pieta' into his own developing vision of the artist. Beckett

also responds to Dante's 'pieta', both in image and in

language, but his appropriation of Dante's 'pieta' is totally

in contrast to that of Joyce. Stephen wants to transcend the

daily experience, but Belacqua tries to translate the suffering

of existence into 'rational concepts and cliches'. Thus Joyce

and Beckett were deeply moved and influenced by Dante, but

both in their own ways. Immersed in a meaningless surrounding,

Joyce's hero wants to escape into the epiphanic vision of a

true artist. Beckett's heroes go further. Belacqua likes to go

back to the darkness in the womb, 'in the caul on my back in

">40 the dark for ever • Beckett's first novel ~~, his only

fiction having the framework of a traditional novel, may be

compared with Joyce's Portrait both of which are experimental

in a deeper sense, and at the same time apparently unexper~ental

because of their conventionally realistic structure. In Murph¥

the author narrates the tragi-comic antics of Murphy in London

who flees from women, unlike Joyce's Leopold Bloom, and in

doing so, gets into a lunatic asyl~m, not as an inmate, but as

a sympathiser, and finally dies there in his garret. Though

unlike Joyce's hero, Hurphy is not given to silent introEpections,

both of them bubble 1.-1i th the characteristic wit of Irishmen. As

Friedman says : 'But the Irish Wit which is so plentiful in

41 Joyce overflows into Beckett's work'

30

The next novel Watt is written in an extremely

unconventional narrative technique. The form and content of

this plotless novel are inseparable from each other. Like Joyce

in his later novels Beckett believes that it is not the task

of the artist to fulfil the logical narrative expectations of

his readers. So in Watt, one finds long passages, with monotonous

irrelevant words which instead of goading thought, impede it.

His experiments with language can be traced in his practice of

alliterating words, reversing letters in words, inverting the

word-order in sentences and sentence-order in paragraphs. Given

below is an example of Beckett's use of monotono~sequence of

words intended to mock the narrative sequence of action in

traditional novels :

The ordinary person eats a meal,then rests from

eating for a space, then eats again, then rests

again ••• and indeed I may add thirst, to the

best of his ability and according to the state

42 of his fortune • •

Beckett thus borrows one of his major devices directly from Joyce

in order to emphasize his own vision.

Another featun:~ that Beckett shares with Joyce is the

narrational need to keE:!p his heroes constantly moving from one

place to another. This motif is named as •odyssey motif' by

Friedman in his essay 11Samuel Beckett : an Amalgamation of Joyce

and Proust 11• Beckett's heroes are constant wanderers in search

31

of •self', the inner 'I', and so he finds the 'Odyssey motif'

most suitable for his narrative purpose. It is, therefore,

woven thr~ugh the main thematic structure of his French trilogy

(translated into English by himself ) Molloy,

Molone Dies and The Unnamable : Molloy, Moran, Malone,lhnamable

are 'all engaged in some sort of quest•. In Joyce the quest is

to enter into the sublime artistic region to find out the truth

at the centre of external reality. In Beckett the quest is to

uncover the inner self, to excavate the inner 'I'. Man exists

alone and bound in time waiting for something latent in life to

ooze out and give it meaning and direction. Perhaps 'that

something' will illuminate the true inner self of man. The

tangible representation of social reality or of community life

is totally absent in Beckett. His characters gradually move out

of the objective reality of time and space, rejecting the world

of phenomena and the bodily functions, so much so that even the

desire to identify one's location and other space-time

contigencies ceases to work. Thus the whole fabric of thought

in his fiction turns out to be just an inner space. Though the

main themes of Beckett: 's fiction are of exile and alienation

from society, the heroes relentlessly strive to forge an

interface between the unified mind and body by checking or

preventing any resultant split between the two. The verbal

texture and character-delineations focussing on habits and

idiosyncracies of individuals give him some remarkable &finity

with Joyce. The stones that Molloy sucks, the pencil-stub that

32

Malone chews, the recurrent references to bicycles and

umbrellas are symptoms of an almost primitive addiction to

'totemistic practice'. This reminds one of Stephen Dedalus

carrying an ashplant and of Bloom's holding on to his

shrivelled potato.

The young artist Stephen Dedalus recognizes himself

to be a member of the community, and while keeping his

relation to the community intacts he also learns the artistic

techniques of individuation. Beckett, being a member of the

community, amalgamates his own individual talent with the

tradition and accepts the task to forge in the smithy of his

soul the uncreated conscience of his race. Adrienne Monnier

has rightly observed that Be<;kett is 11 a new Stephen Dedal us

43 striding all by himself along the strand 11

•

It is a new trend in modern Beckett criticism to focus

on the points of difference between Beckett and Joyce.

Beckett's own assessment of their relationship is revealed in

the famous Israel Shenker interview :

The kind of work I do is one in which I'm not

master of my material. The more Joyce knew the

more he could. He's tending toward omniscience

and omnipotence as an artist. I'm working with

impotence, ignorance. I do not think impotence

44 has been exploited in the past •

33

The contrast between Beckett's impotence and Joyce's

omnipotence accounts for the main dichotomy between their

aesthetic perceptions and creativity. Beckett's trilogy serves

to provide ill ustrat~ions of the areas of contrast with Joyce's

fictions. Malone presents a 'parodic reversal' of Molly Bloom:

he is lying in bed, partially paralysed, writing a monologue

and trying hard to stop all bodily processes while Molly Bloom

moves to and from her chamber-pot. Malone is a lonely figure

while HCE (the hero of the Finnegans Wake) is surrounded by

family patrons and 'the whole family of Man'; dreaming of the

past and spring-time and holding death at bay lies HCE, but

Malone (as Beckett represents the reversal of natural proces~s

through him) encounters death, which is a very difficult and

diligent ordeal, consciously striving for death : 'I could die

today, if I wished, merely by making a little effort, if I

45 could wish, if I could make an effort" • While Joyce's sentences

build, accumulate, extend, expand,,these of Beckett are intended

'to annihilate all they purport to record'.

Joyce's characters often merge and flow : characters

like HCE and ALP flow into one another so smoothly that the

readers are not aware of the exact moment of such inner shiftings.

Individuals may come in contact with different types of people

like robbers, giants, old men, young men etc., but Joyce always

meets himself through such figures in fiction. Beckett's world

offers a different gl:lmpse of human figures who never come close

34

enough to allow self-recognition for the author or readers

through them. They may be 'a gallery of moribunds' but they

are stubbornly diffe:!rent from each other and from real people

in society ; they simply pass each other in a straight line

without any interaction.

In Joyce a single properly placed letter can have

multiple meanings. But in Beckett words are 'shit' and so

they are not the stuff of creation. The nameless hero of the

Text for Nothing laments :

That's right, wordshit, bury me, avalanche,

and let there be no more talk of any creature,

nor of a world to leave, nor of a world to reach,

in order to have done, with worlds, with creatures,

46 with words, with misery, misery, misery •

How it is is to some extent, Beckett's Joycean work, with the

echoes and patterns of Joycean language, in which the

desiccated static Beckettian void is presented through a

difficult syntactica.l order having no punctuations and giving

a verse-like appearance. Quoted below is such a typical passage:

a body what matter say a body

see a body all the rear white

originally some light spots still

say grey of hair growing still

that's enough a head say a

head say you've seen a head

all that all the possible a

sack with food a body entire

alive still yes living stop panting

let it stop ·ten seconds

fifteen seconds hear this

breath taken of life hear

it said say you hear it good

47 pant on •

35

The typographical innovations that do away with punctuation

like comma or full-stops, capitals (except for proper names)

and allow only breath-pauses inside the biblical-style verse

passages are not purposeless. They are intended to faithfully

transcribe a colloquial voice that can utter words till it

pants rather than according to grammatical syntax in the

process, a new syntax is created in keeping with colloquial

speech, with verbs and conjunctions suppressed, and this

enables Beckett to break away from the form of conventional

fiction. The very elements of 'well-made fiction' are reduced

to Beckett in such a manner that the langua~e in his fiction

deletes the traditional narrative properties, and the

conventional development of sequence is replaced by a movement

tov.;ard silence.

36

Just as the characters like Watt are relegated to

'the dim world behind' as indistinguishable from it, so th~

language in Beckett 'made of words others• words' (The

Unnamable ) reveals a patient, relentless effort to attain

to 'the texture of a fundamental impasse•. The protagonists

are haunted by the knowledge that 'words' are inadequate,

though necessary and powerful, tools of communication. What

Beckett's characters generate in his readers through their

attitude to life is what H.V.Vandrulist calls ~ndeterminacy•,

which he defines thus :

Indeterminacy is the situation Molloy faces when

his utter lack of a destination means that no

road is the right road - or the wrong road. Clearly

Molloy does not face an entirely negative situation,

48 just a radically indeterminate one •

Actually Beckett's works offer a kind of creative response to

the challenge and anxiety of the influence of Joyce's Work in

Progress. This response is so complex and occasionally so

inscrutable that one can have an access to this interaction

only through Beckett himself. Beckett suggested that one should

consider this relationship between himself and Joyce inversely

patterned in terms of their works. When Beckett observed, 'the

more Joyce knew, the more he could', Beckett moved to a

different direction : 'I am working with impotence, ignorance'.

In terms of his fictional works, Beckett's development may be

37

interpreted as a progression towards 'a counter-Joyce

d. . 49 ~rect~on , as Andrew ~ennedy rightly points out. This

'counter-Joyce' movement can be traced quite early in

Beckett's creative response to his compatriot, Joyce, who

gradually becomesthe archetype of the artist as craftsman,

as investigator, as the discoverer and also as the originator

of patterns of thought, Beckett chooses to focus on 'impotence'

in response to Joyce's 'omnipotence', as he realizes 'I do

not think impotence has been exploited in the past'. The

paradigm that H.Vandrulist discovers in Beckett's later works

as the mode of his artistic orientation is aptly defined as

'Beckett's work in Hegress'. This phrase represents Beckett's

movement "toward a representation, or enactment, of failure,

incompetence and silence". This illuminating analysis of

Beckett's response to Joyce as a 'regress• explores the strength

of Beckett to counter the tremendous anxiety of the influence

of James Joyce, the arche.typal artist as the omnipotent

creator. In spite of their differences in orientation as

writers, what strikes one as the singular mark of affinity

between them is their idea of art as a 'painstaking craft' and

their severity of ~esthetic standard.

To say that Beckett had been strongly influenced by

Joyce is no detraction,though nor is it very easy to define

precisely the interaction between Beckett and Joyce in the

sense of the term 'influence'. What kind of 'evidence' is

called 'influence' cannot be precisely demonstrated. However,

38

there is enough scope to trace the force of Joyce's influence

on Beckett while exploring the 'misreading' of Beckett's

fiction, as recent criticism suggests. Joyce has a great

effect on Beckett, but Beckett also chose to rewrite Joyce's

later writings, Beckett supplied Irish lore, helped Joyce

in checking references and sometimes provided him with

solutions that Joyce was searching for; while Joyce embraced

every sphere of knowledge, language and experience, Beckett

doubted everything to formulate an 'impossible art', the

achievement of which would always ensure his distinctive

place.

v

T .s .Eliot in his essay 11Tradi tionar-:d:theindi vidual

Talent 11 argues that to praise those aspects of a literary

work in which the author least resembles his predecessoD.!

39

is the general critical practice. In his opinion this approach

is not wholly sound. He further says :

We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet's

difference from his predecessors, especially

his immediate predecessors ; we endeavour to

find something that can be isolated in order

to be enjoyed. Tffhereas if we approach a poet

without this pregudice we shall often find

that not only the best, but the most individual

parts of his work may be those in which the

dead poets, his ancestors, assert their

immortality most vigorously50 •

Applying this logic one will find that Beckett's talent shines

more brightly in the most original parts of his work in which

the influence of Kafka is evident. Among the earlier writers

whose names have almost inseparably become associated with

Beckett, Kafka is one, whose influence on Beckett has become

almost a cliche. Karl Ragnar Gierow, the Permanent Secretary

40

of the Swedish Academy, had reiterated in 1969 in his

address on the presentation of the Nobel Prize to Beckett

"For Beckett, the forerunner of new modes of expression in

the novel and the drama, is a man of traditions, because he

51 is also a member of the family of Joyce, Proust and Kafka".

Kafka's writings cast long shadows on Beckett's mind

from a long time, and Beckett himself noted his serious

reading of Kafka : "I've only read Kafka in German- serious

reading except for a few things in French and English --

only The Castle in German"52

• Beckett can be located within

the modern tradition of the artist's own unique language,

which has been defined as 'the language of self' by Hoffman,

tracing its through Kafka to Beckett, in his book Samuel

Beckett: The Language of Self {1962). Both Beckett and Kafka,

for their unusually bleak assessment of man and of human

condition have become the most fascinating and important though

disturbing, of the twentieth-century writers • B~th

writers attempt to free man from the inconsistency and

contingency of a purposeless universe, of a morality, divorced

from any, sanctioning power•, under the influence of

Nie~he's bleak ideas of 'Death of God' and of a life 'beyond

Good and Evil'.

The first and foremost element that brings together

Kafka and Beckett is their pessimistic philosophy. The world

41

that is reflected through the works of both is the absurd

world where an individual strives after the 'surd', for

reaching the 'ideal core' an irrational quest, man's

desperate search for 'self', for an identity that lies

beyond the rational bounds or frames of 'reality'. Beckett's

heroes find themselves inextricably caught up in the problems

of beginning and ending, of living a life as an exile, a

punishment for some unknown crime, perhaps the crime of being

born. Death just simply annihilates the problems of living

such a life without solving them. Death appears to be the

main subject of Beckett's work, particularly of his trilogy.

Death is also implicit as the situational mainspring of Kafka's

stories. A Kafka hero sees more and more clearly till he sees

his own death: K. says to Olga in The Castle : "If a man has

his eyes bound, you can encourage him as much as you like to

stare through the blindfold but he'll never see anything.

53 He'll be able to see only when the blindfold is removed" •

That Beckett is an inheritor of the Kafkaesque tradition

is a commonplace criticism • Critics usually exemplify it in

the first instance by a comparative study of Kafka's Castle

and Beckett's ~· It is a known fact that during 1938-44,

Beckett's reading of Kafka's Castle was embroyonic to the

composition of ~· The themes of both are simple but

puzzling. In The Castle a man called K. has ostensibly been

called to take up a job in a village where there is a castle.

42

He arrives one evening in this village wishing to occupy

his allocated position. But those who have summoned himknow

nothing of his appointment; so he is not accepted. He is

turned away. The rest of the book is spent in his repeated

attempts to get himself accepted. The outline story of Watt

also presents the baffled attempts of a man called upon to

perform an apparently simple task. Watt sets out to join as

a servant at Mr Knott's house where he works first on the

ground floor and then on the first floor. But he learns

nothing either about Mr Knott whom he has been serving all

the while, nor about the actual length and then returns to

the ordinary world. Thus written as they are in the third­

person narrative form, both the stories deploy their unique

symbolic techniques to represent man's archetypal quest for

knowing the unknown and the unknowable. The Castle first

appeared as a monologue written in the first person. But

afterwards the omniscient narrator takes the place of the

first-person narrator : gradually •r• dissolves into 'K'. In

Watt the first two parts are presented through different

characters; the next part is narrated in the first person,

and then Sam becomes the narrator. Perhaps K. represents

Kafka, and Sam represents Samuel Beckett, though the stories

are not autobiographical , K. does not know his position or

his rights at first; he does not even seem to know the castle.

Sam always draws a curtain of doubt over everything and

everybody :he doubts Watt's memory and often he doubts his

own memory. This is chiefly because Sam finds out that in

43

speaking to him, 'tiatt inverts the "order of the letters in

the word together with that of the words in the sentenc8

together with that of sentences in the period". This sense

of uncertainty is the comrron thematic ground between Watt and

The Castle.

~vatt and K., the two protagonists, desire to see and

know certain enigmatic figures : Mr Knott and Count stand for

the ultimate goal of these two individuals. Both the figures

have no definite shape or identity and also delegates come from

them. Watt sometimes feels the presence of Knott, but gets

no idea of his physical features even when he knocks against

him. Thus man's search for the 'unknown' is represented

through these multidimensional depictions of experiences or

perceptions of reality in the two novels. In this pursuit the

world of sensual existence and the world of reflection are

found to be in a ceaseless clash. As a result, in Kafka's novel

man's frenzied pursuit of his own elusive self becomes

configurated in Count, who is the typification of God, and in

Beckett's novel Knott, who represents the Absolute, symboli~s

the basic absurdity at the centre of the universe.

Beckett's trilogy often reminds one of Kafka's The

Castle. Molloy, the first book of the trilogy, has Moran as

the hero of the second part. On a sunday in summer Moran is

informed by Gaber, the messenger of an agency, run by Youdi,

44

that he has to leave at once with his son to look for an

individual called Molloy. Youdi's organization with its

network of messengers and agents is similar to the system

of authority in the Count's Castle. Both Youdi and the

Count are unapproachable, remote, and consequently, seem

godlike to Moran and K. Beckett's 'misfit' heroes are

identical to Kafka's nonheroes, who always fail in their

quests and as such 1~ey become Kafkaesque counterparts

engaged in endless and futile quests -the 'faceless'

individuals in search Qf grace- ·in this godless world.: Beckett• s·

heroes are, in a way, all artists, all writers (some by

themselves, some with the help of deputy) and so they are

creators. They exhibit a disgust for life. Beckett examines

layer by layer the mind of the creator. Thus his novels turn

into apparently disorganised streams of 'heavily punctuated,

disembodied thought". Kafka's heroes try to unite being and

thing, concrete life and abstract thinking, the unconscious

and the conscious. Prof. Enrich describes the duality which

constitutes the essemce of modern novels : "The reaction

against L-the modern, scientific abstract_? way of thinking,

which dissolves everything concrete L-into mathematical

qualities_? is strongly evident in Kafka L-as it is in

- 54 Goethe_/".

The basic difference between Kafka and Beckett has

been pointed out by Beckett himself :

45

The Kafka hero has a coherence of purpose. My

people seem to be falling to bits. Another

difference you notice how Kafka's form is

classic, it goes on like a steam roller almost

serene. It seems to be threatened the whole

time -- but the consternation is in the form.

In my work there is consternation behind the

t . 55

form, no ln the form •

Kafka's heroes have a social setting : they are men for whom

life is impossible to be separated from their functions in

society. But Beckett's heroes are put within the framework

of an 'unsetting' having no reference to society. These

'misfit' heroes of Beckett are trapped in an existential web.

Kafka permits his characters to experience hope, but Beckett

depicts the characters, for the most part, as despairing,

agonizing and irreverent. Kafka's novels have definite

chronology : in The Castle six days of K. 's life are described,

with each chapter followed by the next one sequentially, and

each paragraph linked with the preceding one. But no simple

chronology is followed in Beckett's novels, as the author of

Watt so characteristically introduces its narrative method

in the fourth part :

[dLfference you notice how Kafka's form is

cla sic, it goes on like a steam roller

behind

It seems to be threatened

but the consternation is

there is consternation

55 in the form •

46

Kafka's social setting : they are men for whom

life is impossibl be separated from their functions in

society. But Becket •s heroes are put within the framework

of an 'unsetting' ha ing no reference to society. These

'misfit' heroes of Be kett are trapped in an existential web.

Kafka permits his char cters to experience hope, but Beckett

depicts the characters, most part, as despairing,

agonizing and irreverent. Kafka's novels have a definite

chronology: in The Castle six days of K.'s life are

se~uentially, and each parag linked with the preceding

one. But no simple chronology s followed in Beckett's novels,

as the author of watt so introduces its

narrative method in the fourth p rt J

As Watt told the beginning of his story, not

first, but second, so not fourth, but third,

now he told its end. Two, one, four, three,

that was thE! order in which Watt told his story. u • t . 56 nero1c qua ra1ns are not otherwise elaborated.

47

There are differences between Kafka and Beckett in

respect of their treatment of love. In Kafka love is often

identified with pity. In The Trial the accused K. goes for

the first time to his lawyer seeking help and advice. But

while he is still waiting for admission, the lawyer's mai~

Leni, gives herself to him. To Leni all clients are

beautiful, and she feels pity for them, but her pity is

aroused not by any positive qualities but by one's defects.

In The Castle K. 's affair with 'Frieda • (which in German

means 'peace') acquires a significance in relation to the

theme of K.'s quest for truth. Freda sleeps with K. on the

bar-room floor. She is Klamra's mistress. Thus by establishing

a sexual relationship with Frieda, K. comes vaguely into

contact with the mysterious Castle and thus indirectlyfulfils

part of his yearning to reach the Castle. Thus in Kafka sex

or love is man's indefatigable search for a tangible mode of

connection with the world despite his exclusion from it.

But love only forms episodic affairs in Beckett(except

in Murphy, for Celia's love for Murphy is central to the main

plot), because love affairs seem to have no relevance to the

hero's quest. In ~, for example, the sexual activities

between Watt and the fishwoman Mrs Gorman has no relevance

to the main theme of Watt's search for Mr Knott's identity,

for a live contact with the reality that is Mr Knott. Ruby

Cohn observes in her essay :

Momentarily pleasing as Mrs. Gorman is to ~att,

she arouses his mental more than his sexual

prowess; she becomes another event to exorcize

by explanation, in the way Watt cannot exorcize

Mr. Knott and so he is finally compelled to

leave the establishment, more ignorant than

when he came precisely by all he does not learn

57 "of the nature of Mr. Knott" •

48

In Molloy, Molloy strongly hints that Lousse, whose dog was

run over by Molloy, rescu.es him from mob fury and gives him

food and lodging for sexual reasons. But when Molloy departs

she makes no attempt to hold him back. This partiallyreflects

Beckett's ironical attitude to romance or courtship. Hugh

Kenner points out that Lousse may have symbolised for Molloy

what Calypso symbolised for Odysseus i.e. a temporary need

and fascination in his continuing quest.

In Kafka the plots are plausi~le, the action of heroes

are credible because they reason about events and their

adventures in course of their pursuits. But in Beckett the

plot is most often devoid of any pattern of causal sequence,

in which comic humour and irony are interwoven. Like competent

clown Beckett even plays up the slapstick comedy and wraps all

his writings in 'a most humorous sadness•. But unlike Kafka's

hero, Beckett's hero is not sustained by any hope. Though

Ruby Cohn's comparison implies that a Beckettian character

58 suffers disintegration or decay .of reason , it is a common

49

point of analogy between Beckett and Kafka that reason is

always the mode of exploration of reality in both these

authors.

Through the discomfitures of K. and Watt, Kafka and

Beckett have given a new interpretation of t}le myth of the

questing hero. Ruby Cohn rightly observes . . "Both these

failures are, as Beckett describes in a later creation,

paradigmatic of the human species. As such, they have a

unique appeal for that species, in all the urgency of its

"59 helplessness • Beckett seems to have been inspired by

Kafka's commitment to the representation of the negative as

his ultimate goal :

What is laid upon us is to accomplish the

60 negative : the positive is already given •

The power to 'accomplish the negative • is, in a sense, the

power to cope with the absurdity of the world, which both

Beckett and Kafka have persevered to recapture in theirworks.

50

1. L.A. C .Dobrez, The Ex is tenti al and its Exits (Athlone

Press, London, 1956), P.51.

2. Tom Driver, "Beckett by the Madeline", Columbia

Universi!:y Forum (Summer, 1961). P 21.

3. Samuel Beckett:, Waiting for Godot, Introduction and

Notes by Javed Malick (Oxford University Press,

New Delhi, 1989), P 16.

4. Albert Camus, The Plaaue translated by Stuart Gilbert

(Penguin Modern Classics, Harmondsworth,Middlesex,

England, 1960; 1984), P. 209.

5. Albert Camus, 'The Myth of Sisyphus', The Myth of

Sisyphus (Penguin Modern Classics, Harmendsworth,

Middlesex, England, 1984), P. 108.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid, P. 109.

8. Ibid.

9. Samuel Beckett:, Proust (Grove Press, New York, 1931),

P.1.

10. The Plague, P.60.

11. Samuel Beckett:, Three Novels by Samuel Beckett ( Grove

Press, Inc, New York, 1968 ), P. 193.

12. The Plague, P. 48.

13. Albert Camus, The Rebel (Penguin Modern Classics,

Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England, 1959; 1984),

P.18.

51

14. Ruby Cohn, Samuel Beckett : the comic gamut( Rutgers

University Press, New Brunswick, New Jercy,1962),

P.294.

15. 1-l.J.Friedman, "The Novels of Samuel Bec:-<:ett: An

P>.rnalgam of Joyce and Proust", Comnarative

Literature XII, ('..-Jinter 1960), P.47.

16. R.N.Coe, Samuel Beckett, (Oxford University Press,

London, 1968), P.92.

17. Frederick J. Hoffman, Samuel Beckett : The Man and his

Works (Forum House Publishin'] Company, Toronto,

1969), P. 82.

18. Samuel Beckett, Proust, P.67-68. (All references to

this essay are from this edition Henceforth only

page numbers will be mentioned.)

19. Samuel Beckett, Molloy, in Three Novels £y Samuel

Beckett, P.8.

20. Proust, P.68.

21. Ibid. P.68.

2 2. Samuel Beckett:, Malone Dies, in Three Novels by Samue}.

Beckett, P. 201.

23. Proust, P. 59.

24. Richard ~acksey, "The Architecture of Time : Dialects

and Structure", Proust : A collection of Critical

Essays; ed. Rene Girard (Prentice-Hall, INC.,

Englewood Cliffs, N.J.,1962), P. 108.

25. Eugene Uebb, Samuel Beckett : A Studv of His Novels

(·Peter 0\ven Ltd., London, 1970)., p.

26. Proust, P. 22.

27. Ibid., P. 621o

28o Ibid., P. 67.

29. Marcel Proust, By Way of Saint Beuve, translated by

Sylvia Townsend \'Jarner (Chatto & 1:/indus, London,

1958), P. 182.

52

30o Samuel Beckett, How it is (Grove Press, New York, 1964),

P. 136. All subsequent references to this text are

from this edition.

31. Ruby Cohn, Back to Beckett : (Princeton University Press,

Princeton, 1973), P. 14o

32. Deirdre Bair, A Biography: Samuel Beckett (:Lowe·and

Brydone -Printers Ltd.·, Thetford, Norfolk, Great Britain, 1978),p.83.

33 0 Samuel Beckett, Our Exagmination Round His Factification for

Incamination of Work in Progress : "Dante ... Bruno

••• Vico ••• Joyce 11 (Faber and Faber, London, 1929),

P. 13o All references to this essay are from this

edition.

34. Hugh Kenner, A Reader's Guide to Samuel Beckett (Thames

& Hudson, London, 1973), P.73.

35o Samuel- Beckett, 11 Dante ••• Bruno ••• Vico ••• Joyce",op.cit.p.3.

36. Ibid., P.3-4.

53

3 'l. Ibid, P. 14 Emphasis original.

38. Aldo Tagliaferri, 'Beckett and Joyce•, Modern Critical

Views : Samuel 3eckett ed. with an Introduction by

Harold Bloom (Chelsea House Publishers, New York,

198:)) I P. 2~1.

39. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young~,

ed. Seamus Deane, (Penguin Books Ltd., England,

1992), P. 187.

40. Samuel 3eckett, More Pricks thankicks, (Grove Press Inco,

New York, 1973), Po32.

41. Melvin J. Friedman, "The Novels of Samuel Beckett : An

Amalgum of Joyce and Proust", Comparative Literature­

XII, (Winter, 1960), P. 51.

42. Samuel Beckett, Watt (Calder and Boyars, London, 1953,

19~0) P. 190. All references to this novel are from

this edition.

43. Deirdre Bair, Op. cit. P. 70o

44. Israel Shenker, 'Moody Man of Letters•, The New York

Times (May 6, 1956), sec 3o

45. Samuel Beckett, 1 Malone Dies• in Three Novels, P.179.

46. ::;amuel Beckett, 11 '.l.'exts for Nothing 11, Stories anu Texts

for Noth.~~ (Grove ~'Jeidenfeld, New York, 1967),

P. 118.

47. Samuel Beckett, How it is, P. 105.

54

48. Har:r;yVandruiist, SamueL Beckett~s Work in Regress : A Study of the Fiction to 1953, (National Library of Canada, Ottow-a, 1993}, p.4.

49. Andrew Kennedy's phrase •a counter-Joyce direction•

quoted in H. Vandrulist•s introduction to ~·Jerk i~

Regr~, P.2o

so. T.S.Eliot, The Sacred vlood : Essays on Poetry and

Criticism, "Tradition andth~Individual Talent,<)"'

(Methuen & Co. Ltd., London, 1953), Po 48.

51. Karl Ragnar Gierow, "Presentation Address", printed in

the edition of Samuel Becket's HappY Days (Faber

and Faber, London, 1961), .p.3.

52. Quoted in Ruby Cohn, 11 \'latt in the light of The Castle 11,

Comparative Literature XIII (University of Oregan,

Spring, 1961), P. 154.

53. Franz Kafka, The Castle (tr. from the German by Willa

and 2dwin Muir (Penguin Books Ltd., Middlesex, 1952,

Reprinted 1962), P. 218.

54. 'dilhem Emrich, KJ;:anz Kafka (A thane urn Verlag, Frankfurt,

1958), P. 85-87.

65. Quoted in Gunter Anders, Kafka (Bmves and Bowes, London,

1960), P. 23. Emphasis mine.

56o Samuel Beckett, Watt P. 214.

57. Ruby Cohn, "~ in the light of The Castle" 1 Op 0 Ci t.,

Po 165.

58. 11 Unlike K. who presumably reasons even on his deathbed,

Hatt•s mind breaks down 11, ibid., P. 166.

59 • Ibido

60. Franz .i(afka, 11 The Great Hall o£ Chin2", quoted in Ho

Vandrulist, Work in Regress, op. cit., P.6.

55