Samuel Beckett & Nothingness: A Short Note

[ The following remarks were written as part of an introduction to a selection of quotations from the plays of Samuel Beckett - as attached. No attempt is made here to outline the significant foreshadowings of Beckett"s thoughht in the modern philosophical tradition, either in their germinal or their developed form - viz., thinkers such as Neitzsche, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Sartre and philosophies such as phenomenology and existentialism which bear an obvious relation to the manner and significance of his literary art. Instead, it is offered as a suggestion about the underlying question of the human spirit - primarily, that is, the question of its existence - which seems so central to his works. ]

In the early plays, there is a perpetual harping on ‘nothing’ as if to indicate the meaninglessness of existence - ‘nothing to be done’, ‘nothing happens’, ‘nothing is funnier than happiness’. A similar sense is conveyed in more extended passages which seem to reflect on our apparent failure to attain full being - a theme touched on by Carl Jung in the celebrated lecture which Beckett heard at the Tavistock Institute - and, relatedly, the inadequacy of language to describe our condition.
  I say apparent failure since the idea of nothingness, in Beckett, seems to imply a lost or unattainable state of plenitude or immanence as much as it implies a present emptiness or deficit of being as if attesting to something that should be there but isn’t - the deus absconditus of agnostic tradition. In this way, it can be said to involves a form of via negativa through which spirituality is attained by an acknowledgement of its absence, an imperative to ‘rejoice’ - or at least while away the time in a spirited fashion - precisely because there is nothing to rejoice in, as T. S. Eliot says his religious poem “Ash Wednesday”:

Because I know that time is always time And place is always and only place And what is actual is actual only for one time And only for one place I rejoice that things are as they are and I renounce the blessed face And renounce the voice Because I cannot hope to turn again Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something Upon which to rejoice [...]

[My italics.]

This version of the via negativa seems to presuppose the existence of a transcendent truth or divinity to whom the poet prays while also foresaking the comfort of the ‘blessed face’ to be sought in ordinary religious faith - a movement of mind similar to that which some critics discover in Beckett and which they interpret as the nadir of agnosticism but which simultaneously reveals the hidden grounds of faith.
  In this way Beckett, though the pre-eminently atheistic writer of modern literature, ultimately seems like an exponent of a kind of inverse spirituality which celebrates the human spirit without expressions of belief in anything (or any thing) but nonetheless a spirit (if only ‘breath’ itself). The scriptural counterpart of this is this is Mark 9.24: ‘Lord, help my unbelief’ - which literally means, ‘help me to believe in You’, but also embraces - at least to the modern ear - the sense that unbelieving is a worthy condition in itself.
 While a ‘spiritual’ Beckett is implied in both the obsessive negations of the early writings and the persistent whisper (or susurrus) of being in the later ones, this remains a tendentious reading, contrary to the given meaning of the texts themselves which articulate no such consolatory or mystical sense.
 Where such a sense can be inferred, it is probably associated with a suffuse element of Protestant mysticism which Beckett is said to have received from his mother, an evangelical Christian from the North of Ireland - more specifically from Gracehill, originally an 18th century Moravian settlement near Ballymena, but which was ultimately subsumed in the Presbyterian majority of that town.
 Beckett as a botched Unionist makes an interesting contrast to Beckett as a failed Republican - terms loosely interchangeable with Protestant and Catholic in an Irish context. Given his famous wartime answer ‘Au contraire’ to the custom-officer’s question, ‘Are you English?’ how much of his character as a thinker and a writer is due to his experience of in-betweenness in the Irish world where he grew up?

BS