It would be easy enough to dismiss such talk as just so much abstruse philosophizing – a language “abstracted to death”, to adapt Beckett’s own phrase. Transformed by the unforgettable prose of his post-war writing, however, such abstractions become another matter altogether. “It’s of me now I must speak”, declares the narrator of The Unnamable,
even if I have to do it with their language . . . . But who, they? Is it really worth while inquiring? With my cogged means? No, but that’s no reason not to. On their own ground, with their own arms, I’ll scatter them, and their miscreated puppets. Perhaps I’ll find traces of myself by the same occasion.
The Cartesian contours of the terrain are unmistakable, and in many ways reading The Unnamable is like retracing the progress of Descartes’ Meditations, in which the philosopher supposes “that everything I see is spurious . . . that my memory tells me lies, and that none of the things that it reports ever happened. I have no senses. Body, shape, extension, movement and place are chimeras. So what remains true?”. Descartes found his answer, emerging from the “inextricable darkness” through the natural light of reason. But if the trend of much Beckett criticism sees him, like any self-respecting postmodernist, taking leave of Descartes before the last hurdle, surely this great question “what remains true?” remains at the heart of his creative enterprise. As radical as his transformation of the post-war cultural landscape was, he never abandoned the attempt to address those questions central to the Enlightenment tradition: Who am I? How can I know? What follows?
What Beckett did finally abandon in the post-war years was a peculiarly Joycean faith in the power of language to express the world. The young Beckett had allowed himself to be carried away by words, not only in early critical works such as his essay on Joyce’s “Work in Progress” (Finnegans Wake) or Proust, but also in the overwrought prose of pre-war novels such as Dream of Fair to Middling Women or Murphy. All this was to change in the aftermath of the Second World War. As Beckett put it to Knowlson in an interview shortly before his death:
I realized that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, in control of one’s material. He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realised that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, subtracting rather than adding.
His decision to start writing in French in 1946 was the most obvious manifestation of this changed outlook, and it marked the beginning of his most creative period. French was for Beckett a language “sans style”; that is, as an acquired language it allowed him to escape what he disparaged as the “Anglo-Irish exuberance and automatisms” of his earlier writing in English.
Knowlson suggests that Beckett’s decision to write in French may have been one way of escaping the influence of Joyce. If so, it was also perhaps a comment by the mature Beckett on the failings of Joyce’s final “novel”, a work in which language becomes detached from the local landscapes of individual memory and linguistic tradition and seeks to encompass the “chaosmos of alle”. Beckett Remembering adds nothing to what we already knew about Beckett’s relationship to Joyce, except perhaps Beckett’s (previously unpublished) comment to Duncan Scott that “Joyce was a greedy writer” – a throwaway remark, but consonant with the sense of a mature Beckett revisiting Joyce’s achievement with a somewhat colder eye, finding in its catholic synthesis of human cultures and its dream of a language above all others the last, towering illusion of high Modernism.
In the end Joyce’s importance for Beckett was primarily ethical; as he once put it to Martin Esslin, it was Joyce’s “seriousness and dedication to his art [that] influenced me”. On the evidence of Beckett Remembering / Remembering Beckett, this is above all the sort of influence Beckett also exerted on the many artists who came within his orbit. The actor and director Alan Mandell’s anecdote is representative in this regard: having asked Beckett why he found it increasingly painful to start up writing again, he was told “Because it gets harder and harder to write a line that’s honest”. “His response”, Mandell recalls, “had such an impact on me that I found myself unable to write to him for almost a year, questioning the honesty of the words I put on paper.” If such confessions raise a smile, they are also typical of the extraordinary respect Beckett inspired, and continues to inspire, as an ethical ideal. For anyone with creative aspirations, he remains the measure of what it means to stake one’s life on art.
