Beyond the Shadow: Acts of Unceasing Creation

This chapter discusses intuition as the method in Henri Bergson's overall philosophical project, a rethinking of metaphysics in terms of duration — that is, time as opposed to space. ‘Intuition is neither a feeling, an inspiration, nor a disorderly sympathy, but a fully developed method’, notes Gilles Deleuze, ‘one of the most fully developed methods in philosophy. It has strict rules, constituting that which Bergson calls “precision” in philosophy’, and the method already assumes, and perhaps subsumes, duration. If duration is accessible at all, it is so through what Bergson — whom Samuel Beckett called to his Trinity students ‘a philosophical visionary’ — discovers as his discourse on method, intuition, which he opposed to the scientific, quotidian functioning of mind.

‘What it is to Have Been’: Movement, Multiplicity and Representation

This chapter explores Samuel Beckett's images of time and motion, which comes most directly from A. A. Luce's Bergson's Doctrine of Intuition and from J. P. Mahaffy — a Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin — and his monograph Descartes (1880), a book Beckett knew thoroughly enough to use freely its ideas, words and phrases for his poem. For Bergson, representation is of a piece with Zeno's trajectory and so a falsification of motion, becoming, or life's flow. Both matter and its representations are then severally, in themselves, false issues without perception, which relies on what Henri Bergson calls a picturing in consciousness, and which finally is also action. Matter and so the universe, for Bergson, ‘is an aggregate of images. And by image we mean a certain existence which is more than that which the idealists call a representation, but less than that which the realists call a thing — an existence placed halfway between the “thing” and the “representation”’.

‘Thought Thinks in its Own Right’: A. A. Luce, Samuel Beckett and Bergson’s Doctrine of Failure

This chapter traces some possibilities of when and how Samuel Beckett's intellectual development might have intersected the developing lines of cultural thought, or what Gilles Deleuze will call lines of flight or ‘nomad’ thought, and suggests a much earlier point of entry for Beckett into such metaphysical issues than has heretofore been acknowledged. Such intersection will finally find a profound realization not only in the work of Beckett but in that of Deleuze and his collaborators as well. The chapter then studies A. A. Luce's book Bergson's Doctrine of Intuition (1922), which would have been Beckett's first opportunity to study the evolution of the individual psyche and engage the discourse of human freedom and creativity.

‘A Mixed Choir’ from The Ditch of Astonishment: An Introduction

This chapter examines the adaptations of Samuel Beckett's prose texts. Artful as such adaptations may be, what they seem to ignore, in the very conception of such performances, is the process of thinking, philosophy, ontology, and often epistemology, particularly the dissipation, or deterritorialization of being, and, consequently, the dispersal of literary character, which may be Beckett's most stunning creative innovation, on page and stage — the replacement of being by becoming. Watt (1953), and other Beckett works, with creatures unnamed and finally unnamable, is an open system that performance tends to close; that is, Watt has no final word, but offers instead replicated images that resonate with various intensities, with repetitions that are rhythms or refrains, and for which the material text, with its lacunae, remains part of the sentient, affective experience.

‘All the Dead Voices’: A Preface

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Modernism: that Modernism is a ‘Breaking Things Open, Breaking Words Open’, as Gilles Deleuze suggests in Negotiations (1995), that it is inherently transgressive, amorphous, and protean, is one of the tenets of this study. Modernism is thus less an historical period than a movement, less a bounded or delimited chronological moment than a flow, a way of thinking or pattern of thought, a mode of investigation which foregrounds the past as memory, not as an inferior or diminished version of the former present, however, but as an organic part of it, as an ontological, accumulating entity in itself. As such, one might say that Modernism blurs distinctions between past and present, between interior and exterior, an inward turn that might be called, after Deleuze, ‘involution’.

Becoming Degree Zero: Authors Vanishing into the Zone of Imperceptibility

This concluding chapter looks at American writer William Burroughs. In many respects, William Burroughs was an apostle of invisibility, assiduously pursuing versions of physical vanishing and advocating, above all, authorial disappearance. He has on occasion declared himself simply an ethereal medium through which his texts pass into the visible world. Samuel Beckett's initial rejection on first meeting Burroughs in 1959 was not solely or particularly to the aleatory nature of the process but to the fact that the cut up method of Burroughs involved using the writing of other authors. Burroughs's reply to such charges generally suggested what one might call today intertextuality — that all writing was cut up or collage in one way or another and that his was different from those only by degree.

A Theatre of Deterritorialization and the Questions We Ask

This chapter explores Samuel Beckett's art. In Beckett's own exploration of imagination, he will call the space of not only his stories but of his art ‘issueless’. Beckett's is not a world of resemblances but a world of differences, not a world of metaphors which suggest likenesses but a world, an art of images, opposed to the ‘neatness of identifications’ that actor Ralph Richardson requested. Not that Beckett's art is wholly divorced from or unrecognizable as the world. Art has what Gilles Deleuze calls a functional quality as well as an expressive quality, the former something of a reterritorialization. But such function, such connection or relation to the familiar, a representation of the world, is at best tenuous or fabricated if not accidental or forced in Beckett's art; at its best, functional features of Beckett's art become expressive features.

Towards a Creative Involution

This chapter analyses one of the most compelling discourses in Creative Evolution (1907), which is Henri Bergson's thinking through the issues of nothing. In this discourse, any negation, any inclusion of a ‘not’ in a statement announces ‘that some other affirmation, whose content I do not specify, will have to be substituted for the one I find before me’ (Bergson 1944: 315). Such is the ‘zero’ of Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari's critique of Sigmund Freud's analysis of the Wolf Man, and centre stage in Beckett's first two published, eponymous, English novels, Murphy (1938) and Watt — the former in its pursuit of not annihilation but fulfilment, the latter plagued by self-generated apparitions in the house of Mr Knott. It is the nothingness of routine in the latter that gives way or mounts up to the nothing of existence and the waste of being. Beckett's negations, then, produce or result in neither absence nor void.

The Invention of the Modern: A Symbiotic Remapping

This chapter begins with a remapping of an early-twentieth-century mode of discourse about the nature of memory, consciousness, dreams and perception, and their political implications for religion and science as well as for philosophy and literature. This remapping offers something of an enhancement of and so a symbiotic encounter with (and not a replacement for) the development of what is loosely called Modernism, particularly in literature, and Samuel Beckett's relationship to it. The remapping, furthermore, engages with an emerging empiricist, materialist science in the early years of the twentieth century that rejects what might be called speculating or theorizing about what cannot be measured, consciousness in particular, even as such theorizing will finally come to lead, if not dominate, the advances of twentieth-century physical science.