Beckett Samuel - Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett

Andrew Gibson

REAKTION BOOKS

Titles in the series Critical Lives present the work of leading cultural figures of the modern period. Each book explores the life of the artist, writer, philosopher or architect in question and relates it to their major works.

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First published 2010

Copyright Andrew Gibson 2010

The right of Andrew Gibson to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.

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No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Page references in the Photo Acknowledgements and Index match the printed edition of this book.

Printed and bound in Great Britain
by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Gibson, Andrew, 1949

Samuel Beckett. (Critical lives)
1. Beckett, Samuel, 19061989.
2. Dramatists, Irish 20th-century Biography.
I. Title II. Series
822.912- DC 22

ISBN: 978 1 86189 517 2

Nor can there be work so great

As that which cleans mans dirty slate.

W.B.Yeats

In one of Becketts late plays, we encounter a haunting figure. A prematurely old woman with famished eyes sits rocking in a rocking-chair. A voice speaks, telling her the story of a woman whose vain hope of human contact led her to the rocking-chair in which her mother sat and rocked till her end came ( CDW , p. 440). There she sat down and rocked herself,

saying to the rocker

rock her off

stop her eyes

fuck life

stop her eyes

rock her off

rock her off ( CDW , p. 442)

The play ends with these lines.

Fuck life is not a sentiment ever likely to win assent from biographers. Obviously and by definition, biography can hardly accommodate it. Biography is necessarily affirmative. The assumption that life has value, that individual lives deserve monuments, substantial and often bulky tributes, is intrinsic to the genre. Furthermore, the life that has value is specific in kind. It is life as it has already been lived, life as grasped in retrospect. That the subject of the biography might for instance be a writer who conceives of his or her art as a criticism of life, as a mode of speculation, an enquiry into prospects not retrospects, makes no difference to biographical discourse. It is presumably better to have biographies of, say, Swift, Blake, Rimbaud, Artaud and Woolf than not to have them. Yet one might argue all the same that, however close or sympathetic their biographers to these writers, biography necessarily sets its face against the most urgent admonitions of their art. In this respect, modern biography might even seem to have repeatedly collided with modern art, stoutly resisting its implications.

Fuck life: Sin Phillips in Rockaby at the Barbican Pit, London, 2006.

This has been precisely the case with Samuel Beckett. The biographies proceed in the opposite direction to his writings. For reasons that still puzzle us, Becketts art repeatedly turns towards minima. James Knowlsons widely and rightly lauded, authorized, vast and fact-crammed life amounts to 872 pages. At 646 pages, Anthony Cronins competitor volume is hardly much more modest. On the one hand, Knowlson and Cronins biographies are essential reading. Indeed, they complement each other, Cronins grasp of the Irish Beckett and his imaginative feeling for the miserable extravagance of his subject leavening Knowlsons awesome meticulousness, his exemplary scholarly care. I am humbly indebted to both throughout this short account. On the other hand, it seems to me to be well worth trying to write something more like a minimalist life of Beckett, by way of closing the gap between the biographical project and his own. What does Becketts life look like if narrated in more Beckettian terms?

Beckett wrote of humanism that it was a word that one reserves for the times of the great massacres ( DI , p. 131). He repeatedly stripped his characters of the attributes held most to distinguish man as lord of creation. His works resound with indictments of humanist self-aggrandizement. He sees humanism as rooted in a will to be pleased with oneself. His jibes at its expense range from the scathing to the comic to the more or less mildly ironical. Its human, says the Unnamable, a lobster couldnt do it ( TR , p. 375). Yet, at the same time, he never seriously lapses into the brutal repudiation of common humanity that so marred the work of certain contemporaries, like Cline (whose novels Beckett much admired). He merely understood very well that humanism has little to do with human beings. So what happens if one forsakes the familiar humanist conspectus and tries to write a biography of Beckett without automatically and everywhere placing the self-evidently treasurable, unique human being at its centre? What happens if we conceive of Beckett as, rather like Giorgio Agamben, re-imagining the human thing? I hope to provide at least one possible answer to these questions in what follows.