Beckett, Sartre and Phenomenology

Matthew Feldman

And so we make a new beginning, each for himself and in himself, with the decision of
philosophers who begin radically: that at first we shall put out of action all the convictions
we have been accepting up to now, including all our sciences.
- Edmund Husserl (1859-1938)

A fictional technique always relates back to the novelists metaphysics. The critics task is to
define the latter before evaluating the former.
- Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)1

I.
Curious, one might think, that the linking school of thought, or ism, for
these two versatile writers in the title above is not existentialism but
phenomenology; and more specifically, Husserlian phenomenology, as shall
presently become clear. Arguably, at the height of their respective notoriety
in the 1960s that decade when Sartre famously and authentically
declined the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964, while Beckett accepted the
annual award quietly and by proxy five years later the two were often
viewed as novelist-philosophers par excellence, pioneers of a literature of
authenticity, perhaps even proponents of a theatre of the absurd. John
Cruickshank, for example, introducing his edited The Novelist as Philosopher in
1962, had already noted that
Dr Matthew Feldman is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Northampton, Associate
Fellow of the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford, and an editor of Wiley-
Blackwells Compass: Political Religions (http://www.religion-compass.com). He has published
widely on Beckett, including essays in SBT/A and JOBS; the edited volumes Beckett and
Phenomenology (with Ulrika Maude) Becketts Literary Legacies and The International Reception of
Samuel Beckett (with Mark Nixon), Beckett and Death (with Steve Barfield and Phil Tew); as well as
the revised monograph, Becketts Books: A Cultural History of Samuel Becketts Interwar Notes
(Continuum, London: 2008)
 Limit{e} Beckett 0 | Spring 2010

their fundamental philosophical theories are present in their work

by implication only. The ideas belong to the works of pure
philosophy; certain consequences of these ideas are alone worked
out in fictional form . a striking synthesis is achieved which
preserves the strictness of the philosophy while not weakening the
art by obstructive didacticism, but it is a synthesis obtained at the
readers expense. (13)

To the aid of such floundering readers progressively appeared an army of

literary critics, who interpreted both Sartres and Becketts literary uvres as a
form of existential fiction. Needless to say, great justification may be
attached to this characterization of Sartre, author of the 1943 Being and
Nothingness and the 1945 Existentialism and Humanism, those seminal manifestos
of existentialist doctrine whereby, famously, existence precedes essence.
This is not to marginalize Heideggers importance here to the development
of existentialist thought even if his chasing after Being separates
Heidegger from other philosophers of the everyday and arguably paved the
way for his catastrophic support for Nazism, as I have posited elsewhere.2
Whatever the case, if Sartre is regarded as a founding voice of existentialist
philosophy, then it follows that his formidable artistic output of novels, plays
and short stories may be profitably viewed as demonstrations of what
Cruickshank termed his fundamental philosophical theories.

Yet the protagonist of this article, Samuel Beckett, did not expound
fundamental philosophical theories, did not work in pure philosophy, and
did not adhere to any readily recognizable form of philosophical strictness
his was a body of disjecta, of fatigue and disgust, as the Addenda to Watt
puts it. For Beckett wrote no explicitly philosophical treatises, made few
public statements which were anyway far more notable for their opacity

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than their didacticism and moreover, Beckett was an artist whose writing
can be easily seen as two long, sustained fingers to the systematizing and
logical processes intrinsic to Western philosophy. Taking one
contemporaneous example from Becketts short fiction, All Strange Away
begins Imagination dead imagine. Presumably, this is not the type of
imagination advocated by Sartres first freelance book of philosophy,
Gallimards 1940 L'imaginaire : psychologie phnomnologique de l'imagination
(translated as The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination). And
far from presenting any interpretative foothold for a given philosophy let
alone existentialism Becketts text offers only uncertain statements in
neither first nor third person, offering no recognizable place nor time;
indeed, All Strange Away offers an extended description of a diagram that
seems to undermine its own status as prose literature:

No real image but say like red no grey say like something grey and
when again squeeze firm down five second say faint hiss then
silence then back loose two seconds and say faint pop and so arrive
though no true image at small grey punctured rubber ball or small
grey ordinary rubber bulb such as on earth attached to bottle of
scent or suchlike that when squeezed a jet of scent but here alone.
So little by little all strange away. Avalanche white lava mud seethe
lid over eye permitting return to face of which finally only that it
could be nothing else, all right. (Beckett 1995, 169)

Only a few years earlier, in the mid-1950s precisely when Beckett was
published as stating I cant see any trace of a system anywhere (Beckett to
Israel Shenker, qtd. in Graver, Lawrence and Federman, 149) Sartre was
already fitting Becketts literature into his own, now-politically
revolutionary, fundamental philosophical theories. In several interviews
translated and collected in the 1976 Sartre on Theater, he repeatedly coupled

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Beckett with Eugene Ionesco (alongside other writers of the absurd) in brief
references to Waiting for Godot as a form of bourgeois theater; that is, drama
which is profoundly, essentially, bourgeois in content:

Take Beckett. I like Waiting for Godot very much. I go so far as to

regard it as the best thing that has been done in the theatre for
thirty years. But all the themes in Godot are bourgeois solitude,
despair, the platitude, incommunicability. All of them are a product
of the inner solitude of the bourgeoisie. And it matters little what
Godot may be God or the Revolution. [] What counts is that
Godot does not come because of the heroes inner weakness; that
he cannot come because of their sin, because men are like that.
(qtd. in Contat and Rybalka, 51)

The same faint praise is extended to Endgame in two further references to

Beckett over the next five years, again, as part of Sartres larger analysis of
bourgeois theatre through the lens of his increasingly idiosyncratic,
philosophical post-Stalinism.

In a lecture to a German audience in 1966, Sartre credited Beckett with

helping to revolutionize postwar European theatre. In a statement echoing
Becketts own sentiments on a putative Theatre of the Absurd, which was
inappropriate for him because the absurd implies value judgments (Beckett,
qtd. in Juliet, 149), Sartre claimed that the theater of the absurd is itself
absurd, because none of them regards human life and the world as an
absurdity even Beckett, about whom I shall have more to say a little
later. But more is an overstatement, and Sartres promissory note instead
turns out instead to be a subtle evasion, one dressed in an unusual anecdote.
For in this lecture, Beckett is dragooned into being the spokesperson of the
enfants terribles in French drama, an artist attempting to shock the audience

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for an audience ought not to accept a play until after they have been
shocked to the core specifically, shocked into a relaxation of inhibitions.
Sartre, in this lecture, continues, I believe that Beckett was speaking for all
of them when he exclaimed as he heard the whole audience frantically
applauding the first night of Waiting for Godot, My God, there must be
something wrong, it isnt possible, theyre applauding it! (qtd. in Contat
and Rybalka, 135, 156)

In short, Sartres sketch is one of modernist defamiliarization on steroids.

Or instead, if you like, Beckett may be seen to offer an anticipatory
postmodern exercise in self-referential and deconstructive writing.
Remaining momentarily with the former, Anglophone literary critics
including Martin Esslin. Ruby Cohn, Michael Robinson, Richard Coe,
Hugh Kenner and several others inflected Becketts writing with existential
theories, so essential to founding Anglophone Beckett Studies during the
1960s. Broadly speaking, influential existential readings of Becketts fiction
were advanced both early and often. One paradigmatic example to be
considered more closely later on is Edith Kerns impressive 1970 Existential
Thought and Fictional Technique: Kierkegaard, Sartre, Beckett, which had argued
during existential criticisms heyday:

From its inception, existential thought has felt itself at home in

fiction. Because of its intense inwardness and the commitment of
its proponents, it has expressed itself more strikingly in imaginative
writing than in non-fictional treatises. According to modern
existentialist thinkers, the paradox and absurdity of life can be
more readily deduced from fundamental human situations
portrayed in fiction than described in the logical language of
philosophy which is our heritage. Existentialisms abhorrence of

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rigid thought systems as being alien to life and existence has equally
pointed toward a preference for poetry and fiction. (xiii)

Several additional studies may be included in this Beckettian existential feast

as well, including Cormier and Pallisters Waiting for Death (1976), John
Fletchers Samuel Becketts Art (1969), Hannah Copelands Art and the Artist in
the Works of Samuel Beckett (1975), Lance St. John Butlers Samuel Beckett and the
Meaning of Being (1984), and Livio Dobrezs superb The Existential and Its Exits
(1982) all published within 10 years either way of Kerns work; that is, at
the height of existentialisms heyday. Clearly, the postwar popularity of
existential philosophy in Europe and the United States played no small part
in fashionable readings of Becketts uvre. Indeed, the desolation and
uncertainty pervading the Beckettian world appears to have reflected the
picture Western civilization in fact wanted, or actually had, of itself. That is
to say, with both Auschwitz-Birkenau and Mutually Assured Destruction
themselves less than a decade apart, neither his fellow Irishmens Wildes wit
nor Joyces verbal gesticulations seemed appropriate to this era, one that
Beckett had likened in 1946, in a draft radio script entitled The Capital of
the Ruins, to the time-honored conception of humanity in ruins (Beckett
1995, 278). Time and again, we see an interpretative Zeitgeist at work in the
international reception of Samuel Beckett in the decades since 1945, with
Becketts postwar writings acting as a kind of fun-house mirror for
contemporary society.

Yet as I argued in 2002, this critical reflection of cultural preferences cuts

both ways temporally, and embraces the latter, currently dominant trend in
literary criticism, namely poststructuralism.3 While this consideration is
chronologically peripheral to the unfolding phenomenological discussion at

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hand, it is interesting to note the way in which postructuralist readings of

Beckett displaced then-dominant existentialist ones, just as the cultural turn
was signposted around Western universities from the about mid-1980s. This
itself produced some excellent accounts of Becketts work, including Steven
Connors landmark Samuel Beckett: Theory Repetition, Text (1988), Anthony
Uhlmanns Beckett and Poststructuralism (1990) and Carla Locatellis Unwording
the World (1992), to name just a few. But importantly, it seems, just like
existentialisms patriarch, poststructuralisms own godfather was curiously
tongue-tied when it came to Becketts uvre. Strangely enough, the only
reference to Beckett in Jacques Derridas extensive canon occurs in an often-
cited interview with Derek Attridge, published in the latters 1992 Acts of
Literature. As with previously paradigmatic existential readings, Derridas
view of Becketts self-deconstructive literature seems to suggest that, here
too, Beckett is the spokesperson for a movement still attempting to catch up
with his legacy. Put another way, for Derrida, Becketts literature has
already anticipated the disconnected communication, floating signifiers, and
linguistic instability at the heart of deconstruction:

[Beckett] is an author to whom I feel very close, or to whom I

would like to feel myself very close; but also too close. Precisely
because of this proximity, it is too hard for me, too easy and too
hard. I have perhaps avoided him a bit because of this
identification. Too hard also because he writes in my language, in
a language which is his up to a point, mine up to a point (for both
of us it is a differently foreign language) texts which are both too
close to me and too distant for me to be able to respond to them.
How could I write in French in the wake of or with someone who
does operations on this language which seem to be so strong and so
necessary, but which remain idiomatic? How could I write, sign,
countersign performatively texts which respond to Beckett? How
could I avoid the platitude of a supposed academic metalanguage?
It is very hard. (Attridge, 60)

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Interestingly, this is a far different kind of self-censorship, or evasion, than

that offered by Beckett on existentialism; in terms of his own engagement
with contemporaneous philosophy, Beckett was not to be pinned down by
interlocutors in two familiar interviews from 1961:

Have contemporary philosophers had any influence on your thought?

I never read philosophers.
Why not?
I never understand anything they write.
All the same, people have wondered if the existentialists problem of being may
afford a key to your works.
Theres no key or problem. I wouldnt have had any reason to
write my novels if I could have expressed their subject in
philosophic terms.
(to Gabriel DAubarde, 16 Feb. 1961, qtd in Graver and
Federman, 217)

One cannot speak anymore of being, one must speak only of the
mess. When Heidegger and Sartre speak of a contrast between
being and existence, they may be right, I dont know, but their
language is too philosophical for me. I am not a philosopher. One
can only speak of what is in front of him, and that now is simply the
mess. (to Tom F. Driver, Summer 1961, qtd in Graver and
Federman, 219)

Here Beckett, characteristically, seems to throw more darkness than light on

the matter. But some disingenuous commentary is nevertheless still visible.
In the specific case of Beckett and Sartre, at least, the former certainly
understood something of the latters philosophy. More to the point, as is
argued below, Sartres work helped to further revolutionize Becketts writing
at a specific, critical point in time, ironically putting him on track for Sartre
to claim thirty years later that Beckett had revolutionized the theater. Yet

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at this point and at the very least in terms of the interviews cited above, as
insightfully noted by Rubin Rabinovitz long ago, it might be borne in mind
that Samuel Beckett says in interviews that he knows little about philosophy;
but his little could easily be another mans abundance (qtd. in Porter and
Brophy, 261).

A methodological aside closes this, the first of three sections forming

Beckett, Sartre and Phenomenology (via Husserl). For as suggested above,
the international reception of Becketts art may be considered mimetic of
postwar interpretative priorities not just in the US and Europe, but
refreshingly, globally.4 In terms of tracing out Becketts intellectual debts,
this would only seem to reinforce the heuristic value of falsifiable
scholarship in establishing the facts, yes, facts, underpinning any theoretical
approach to Becketts writings. The very opacity of Becketts literature,
moreover, demands it. For this is an author that can be recruited to any
cause, any ism, any branding campaign, ranging from an Apple Beckett to
a political Beckett. The perspective offered here, centering on the relevance
of theorizing from a position of empirical accuracy is, in part, also powered by the
absolutely enormous corpus of unpublished material now available in
manuscript, online and print media.5 In short, new findings in the archives
are able to support empirically-grounded readings of Becketts work. This
going back to the archives, in fact, can help criticism to paradoxically
advance; in this case, through the prism of phenomenological interpretation
of Becketts development between the writing of Murphy and Watt.

Furthermore, the advancing of such falsifiable claims the utility of

which was recently debated in the Free Space section concluding Samuel

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Beckett Today/AujourdHui (SBT/A) 21 has the singular capacity to unravel

important matters of artistic influence in modernist literature. Interpretative
claims first supported by evidence able to be refuted are no less valid here than in
other humanistic disciplines, similarly dedicated to advancing knowledge.
The case of the above views by three very different Left Bank (and left-wing)
intellectuals aptly illustrates the point. The interviews by Derrida, Sartre
and Beckett cited above all reveal a strange proximity and uncannily similar
reticence toward one another, one crying out for falsifiable disentanglement.
To be sure, these intellectuals tackled what they variously understood as the
mess in divergent ways but divergent from what? Or whom?

II.
The short answer is Edmund Husserl, founder of phenomenology. Both
existential humanism and poststructuralism, those two dominant readings of
Becketts uvre, are themselves part of what Paul Ricoeur has called the
heretical legacies of Husserlian phenomenology.6 By way of example,
Jacques Derridas 1954 dissertation was entitled The Problem of Genesis in
Husserls Philosophy, while his first book, in 1962, introduced and translated
Husserls Origin of Geometry. Already twenty years earlier, Sartre had been
introduced to Husserls ideas by Raymond Aron, just back from studying
abroad in Berlin during 1933. Aron had reported: this glass, this table []
phenomenologists spoke of them philosophically. That was evidently
enough to make Sartre blanche, for he had been looking for a philosophy of
the everyday to structure his as-yet untitled novel (Cohen-Solal, 91).
Thereafter, Sartre directed four years of intensive study to exhaust Husserl
(1984, 84), culminating in his breakthrough work, Nausea, published in April
1937. Moving backward critically, as it were, may therefore offer a

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paradoxical opening for phenomenology in terms of literary criticism. In

Beckett Studies at least, such a revisiting of Husserlian phenomenology has
remarkably few scholarly antecedents. As this second section will empirically
show, phenomenology may well have been the decisive change between the
interwar Murphy, the wartime Watt and the postwar Trilogy (followed, of
course, by the shock of the 1953 Parisian debut of Waiting for Godot (written
1949) that first established Becketts international recognition.

Interestingly, Beckett and Sartre actually knew each other in interwar

France, thanks to Alfred Pron. Pron had shared rooms with Sartre at the
Ecole Normale Suprieure prior to taking up a 2-year visiting lectureship in
French literature at Becketts Alma Mater, Trinity College, Dublin, between
1926 and 1928. At this time, Pron became the first of Becketts deeply
cerebral friendships contributing to what James Knowlson has called The
Growth of a Mind over the later 1920s (60, 65). (Those later filling this role
in the artistic developments to ensue in Becketts next twenty years extended
to Jean Beaufret, Brian Coffey and Georges Duthuit, in particular). Through
Pron, Sartre and Beckett appear to have met at the point when the latter
accepted the inverse academic position held by Pron in T.C.D. two years
previously, becoming a visiting lecteur in English at the Ecole between 1928
and 1930. During these years, Beckett also met a man destined to become
his closest confidant, Thomas MacGreevy, who Beckett succeeded at the
Ecole and who had introduced both Beckett and Pron to James Joyce in
Paris (see Ackerley and Gontarski, 431-2). During this time, Pron and
Beckett translated the Anna Livia Plurabelle section of Work in Progress
together, surely attesting to their intimacy as friends. Moreover, a number of
important features in Becketts life and writing emerge at this point. Over

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the course of this first, extended Parisian sojourn, Beckett met Sartre,
Beaufret, MacGreevy and even Suzanne, his later partner; he moved into
the Joyce circle (if only briefly at this point, due to Lucia Joyces unfolding
illness); and importantly for present purposes, he produced his first
published work in 1929, DanteBruno.Vico..Joyce. Here, Becketts
homage to what became Joyces Finnegans Wake makes the earliest statement
of the problem which was to vex Beckett over the next decade: the subject-
object relationship:

Here form is content, content is form. You complain that this stuff
is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read
or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened
to. (1984, 27)

Indeed, it is this fence, this window, between form and content, between
subjectivity and objectivity or more technically, between individual
perception and intersubjective reality which phenomenology sought to
overcome, as Sartre was to find over the mid-1930s. And during these same
years, a strikingly similar subject-object preoccupation was right at the
forefront of Becketts artistic mind. As Mark Nixon and Erik Tonning have
fruitfully shown, the very interplay of form and content which Beckett
praised in Joyces Work in Progress was also something of a thrown artistic
gauntlet for Becketts own experimental poetics during the mid-1930s. In
Tonnings summation,

this method of dissonance aims to stage an encounter with what is

alien to language from within language; but this must by
definition entail some residual form of continued involvement in
the phenomenal realm, and must re-enact in however attenuated
a form the division between subject and object. (47)

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Thus over nearly a ten-year period, the problematical issue of this subject-
object dissonance, or to employ Mark Nixons important description, veil
between word and world, was a central challenge to Becketts artistic
experimentation at the outset of his writing career.7

And then, on 26 May 1938 about halfway between the completion of

Murphy and the commencement of Watt Beckett wrote to Thomas
MacGreevy, I have read Sartres Nause & find it extraordinarily good. But
you would not agree with me (2009, 626). Then, quite possibly in order to
pursue the philosophical-artistic rendering of subject-object synthesis
provided by that breakthrough novel, Beckett read Sartres 1936 Ecole
dissertation, published as LImagination, making three short entries into his
vitally-important Whoroscope Notebook, as John Pilling has painstakingly
demonstrated (2004, 46). In turn, these jottings reveal that Beckett likely
read the whole of Sartres Imagination, which concludes with a lengthy
critique of Husserlian phenomenology, first introduced by Sartre through
the celebrated maxim: a consciousness is always consciousness of something
(32). Thereafter, Sartre progressively depicts Husserl as philosophically
Herculean: destroying nearly every prior canon of Western thought to have
come before; and precisely doing so by unifying the subject-object relation
around Husserlian intentionality. In thus clearing the Augean stables of
Western philosophy, Becketts introduction to Husserl in Sartres Imagination
was an unmistakably hyperbolic one.

Redoubling the force of this reading of Husserlian-Sartrean

phenomenology in spring 1938, this brief engagement in effect represents
the final evidence of Becketts philosophical struggle with the relation

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between subject and object; indeed arguably, these notes represent his final
struggle with philosophy full stop. By mid-1938, it would seem Western
philosophy had fully served its didactic purpose. Henceforth, while
continuing to draw upon substantial notes already accumulated over the
past decade, in future only those thinkers with whom Beckett felt a personal
affinity appear to be revisited (like Samuel Johnson and Arthur
Schopenhauer). My point here is that Beckett stopped seeking answers
through philosophy, especially regarding subject-object relations so
demonstrably exercising him previously, and thereafter only went back to
the notes he had already compiled, or instead reread those philosophical
authors he admired. In this sense, Becketts philosophical influences
culminate with Husserlian phenomenology, or better, Husserl as channeled
by Sartre in both fictional and critical form. Yet philosophy is by no means
abandoned, as Rabinovitz also observed, in this case regarding Becketts
Watt (written 1940-45): It is not that he is reluctant to use philosophical
themes, rather, he is unwilling to permit them to undermine the aesthetic
integrity of his works (1984, 140). In aesthetic terms, in fact, Beckett may be
seen to be writing the very no-mans-land between subject and object
announced in his 1934 review, Recent Irish Poetry, a void precipitated by
the modernist breakdown of the object (1984, 70-1). Recalling that review
fully a generation later to his friend, the art critic Duthuit, Beckett explicitly
linked his no mans land concept to that vanished object given such
iconoclastic voice by B in Becketts interview-cum-manifesto from the same
period, the 1949 Three Dialogues:

I remember coming out once, the regulation 20 years ago, being at

that time less little than now, with an angry article on modern Irish
poets, in which I set up, as criterion of worthwhile modern poetry,

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awareness of the vanished object. Already! And talking, as the only

terrain accessible to the poet, of the no mans land that he projects
round himself, rather as a flame projects its zone of evaporation.
(qtd. in Gunn, 15)

In this light, a final question can be pursued more narrowly in terms of

Beckett, Sartre and Phenomenology: what did Beckett perceive in Sartres
Imagination?

III.
Over several preceding chapters that critique Western philosophys tradition
of smuggling in metaphysical assumptions about the perceptual image,
Sartre concludes Imagination, his first major publication, with the chapter
The Phenomenology of Husserl. This specifically addresses the great event
of pre-World-War-I philosophy, Husserls 1913 Ideas, destined to
revolutionize psychology no less than philosophy (127). Mired in both
Husserl and his as-yet unpublished Nausea, for Sartre in the mid-1930s it was
Husserlian bracketing that phenomenological reduction to pure
consciousness that opened new paths for a modern philosophy of life as
lived in the here and now. And this, for Sartre, was a sort of secular
revelation: The notion of intentionality gives a new conception of images,
considering that an image, too, is an image of something. In a critical
passage, Sartre argues:

By becoming an intentional structure the image has passed from

the condition of an inert content of consciousness to that of a
unitary and synthetic consciousness in relation with a transcendent
object [] At a stroke vanish, along with the immanentist
metaphysics of images, all the difficulties adduced [] concerning
the relationship of the simulacrum to the real object, and of pure
thought to the simulacrum. [] Husserl freed the psychic world of

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a weighty burden and eliminated almost all the difficulties that

clouded the classical problem of the relations of images to thoughts.
Husserl did not stop there with his suggestions, however. In effect,
if an image is but a name for a certain way in which consciousness
takes aim on its object, nothing prevents us from aligning physical
images (paintings, drawings, photographs) with images termed
psychic. (131)

Sartre further illustrates this by describing, at length, Husserls analysis of a

painting by Albrecht Drer. With subject and object unified around an
intending consciousness, Sartres essay concludes by leaving it to others
Modernist artists and writers in particular to address a new fissure arising
from Husserlian phenomenology, not between the now-unified subject and
object, but instead between images and perceptions; what Sartre respectively
called memory-images and fiction-images. In what might read as a
program for Watt and Becketts postwar fictions, Sartre concluded his 20-
page paean to Husserl with a call to arms for a phenomenological
psychology:

We know that we must start afresh, setting aside all the

prephenomenological literature, and attempting above all to attain
an intuitive vision of the intentional structure of the image. It also
becomes necessary to raise the novel and subtle question of the
relations between mental images and physical images (paintings,
photographs, etc.) [] The way is open for a phenomenological
psychology. (143)

And where Sartres Imagination ends, it seems, Becketts Watt begins:

There are not, and never could be, images in consciousness.

Rather, an image is a certain type of consciousness. An image is an act,
not some thing. An image is a consciousness of some thing. (Sartre
1962, 146)

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The creative consciousness is driven & obscure. (Beckett, Watt,

Notebook 3, qtd. in Hayman, 33)

Importantly, Watt signals a sea-change in Becketts fiction. Situated

between the semi-obscure fiction, poetry and journalism of the interwar
years, on one side, and the postwar frenzy of writing, so facilitating his
international acclaim on the other, Watt may be seen as the pivotal novel in
Becketts uvre. Simply put, Watt is Becketts artistic fulcrum, linking his early
and mature writings. For Watt marks the abandonment of writing in
English for more than a decade; it marks also the progressive abandonment
of third-person narration, the elimination of conventional literary structures
like plot and setting, and even more contentiously, the abandonment of any
attempt at resolving the problem of writing about something. Sartres reading
of Husserlian phenomenology is, in conclusion, thus a major and under-
investigated influence on Watt, and thereby, Becketts turn toward a writing
that may be considered a form of phenomenological psychology. A final
peek at what this falsifiable linking of Sartres phenomenological influence
on Beckett might entail follows by reference to those remarkably consonant
novels, Nausea and Watt.

Hymeneal still it lay, the thing so soon to be changed, between me and all
the forgotten horrors of joy, recounts Arsene, attempting to explain
existence off the ladder to the eponymous newcomer, despite his recent
costiveness and want of stomach. But in what did the change consist? (41-2).
Grappling with this question over his twenty page short speech, Arsene sets
out his own struggles with meaning in Mr. Knotts sanctuary, thereby also
summarizing Watts ensuing struggle with the subject-object relation:

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The change. In what did it consist? It is hard to say. Something

slipped. There I was, warm and bright, smoking my tobacco-pipe,
watching the warm bright wall, when suddenly somewhere some
little thing slipped . To conclude from this that the incident was
internal would, I think, be rash. For my how shall I say? my
personal system was so distended at the period of which I speak
that the distinction between what was inside it and what was
outside it was not at all easy to draw. Everything that happened
happened inside it, and at the same time everything that happened
happened outside it . It was not an illusion, as long as it lasted,
that presence of what did not exist, that presence without, that
presence within, that presence between, though Ill be buggered if I
can understand how it could have been anything else. (41-3)

Arsenes radical change of appearance so distending his personal system

reads like a homage to Sartres near-contemporaneous novel, La Nause, also
exploring abstract change without object (4). For Nausea presents Antonin
Roquentins battle with a very similar phenomenological breakdown:

Nothing has changed and yet everything is different. I cant

describe it; its like the Nausea and yet its just the opposite: at last
an adventure happens to me and when I question myself I see that
it happens that I am myself and that I am here; I am the one who splits
the night, I am as happy as a hero in a novel. (54)

Additional parallels in the novels are striking, from structural affinities like
the explicit editorial interventions across both works; e.g. Watts climactic
(Hiatus in MS.) and (MS. Illegible) (238, 240) and Nauseas Word left out
and Word is illegible (125) to concluding scenes at a railway station
and all manner of events in between.8 Indeed, the two texts complement
each other in the most intimate of ways, especially if extending to
psychological readings of madness, notably schizophrenia.9 Roquentin
laments to his diary in a manner immediately redolent of Watts finding

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 Feldman | Beckett, Sartre and Phenomenology

himself in the midst of things which, if they consented to be named, did so

as it were with reluctance (78) Things are divorced from their names []
I am I the midst of things, nameless things. Alone, without words,
defenceless, they surround me, are beneath me, behind me, above me (125).
In one of a series of distinctly phenomenological passages on this
experiential change, Roquentin, like Arsene, is outdoors, and

then all of a sudden, there it was, clear as day: existence had

suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost the harmless look of an abstract
category: it was the every past of things, this root was kneaded into
existence. Or rather the [tree] root, the park gates, the bench, the
sparse grass, all that had vanished: the diversity of things, their
individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had
melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, all in disorder naked, in a
frightful, obscene nakedness. (127)

In passing judgment on this perceptual change, although I was not even

conscious of the transformation, Roquentin notes his atrocious joy: This
moment was extraordinary. I was there, motionless and icy, plunged in a
horrible ecstasy (131). When Roquentin is in this state of Husserlian
bracketing, even uttering words is a little like an exorcism (125). But in
Watts overlapping case, this failure is even more general, and indeed
pessimistic: For to explain had always been to exorcise, for Watt (74-5).

As noted earlier, Edith Kern is one of the few Anglophone critics to have
appreciated this philosophical congruence, noting

Sartre and Beckett evoke in this respect analogous situations and

even use similar terms to describe them. Like the Roquentin of
Nausea, Watt feels closing in on him a world that has lost its human
meaning and can no longer be put into human categories or safely
expressed in ordinary language. (190)10

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 Limit{e} Beckett 0 | Spring 2010

Where Jacqueline Hoefer was ready to see Watt as pastiche on Logical

Positivism and Wittgensteins early attempt at an ideal language in the
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as the empirical and rational system (74-5) by
which Watt lives, Kern was far happier to cast Watts linguistic instabilities
with her own existentialist language: Explaining and naming are mans
weapons to exorcise an otherwise demonic universe that is threatening in its
purposelessness (190-1).

Despite this early and impressive critical linking of Beckett and Sartre,
however, I want to conclude by suggesting that it was the
phenomenological Sartre of the later 1930s of real interest to Beckett, and
far less the existential Sartre made famous by the wartime No Exit (1942)
and Being and Nothingness (1943). In the first instance, this sense is captured by
Becketts response, discussing Sartrean philosophy, to Knowlsons arguing
that, from my own perspective, we were too firmly en situation (too limited by
our situation) for the existentialists emphasis on human freedom to have a
lot of meaning, constraints largely glossed over by existentialist philosophy.
Beckett agreed enthusiastically with this objection, Knowlson reports,
saying that he found the actual limitations on mans freedom of action (his
genes, his upbringing, his social circumstances) far more compelling than the
theoretical freedom on which Sartre had laid so much stress (Knowlson and
Haynes, 16-18). This corresponds with letters linking Sartres Nausea to
Albert Camus The Stranger in the mid-1950s; and more importantly, in a
letter of October 1945, some six months after the completion of Watt,
through a comment by Beckett on Morris Sinclairs request for academic
advice regarding a PhD. researching Sartre: His German adhesions would

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 Feldman | Beckett, Sartre and Phenomenology

be into your barrow. Husserl ? (Das Schloss, Der Prozess). Kierkegaard

comes in also. I should be very glad to help you and could introduce you to
Sartre & his world (qtd. in Gunn, 14).

However, if struggles with meaning-creation ultimately lead to Watts

institutionalization ironic, given that Watt was written in wartime hiding
to stay sane the manuscripts 1945 completion itself immediately
preceded Becketts revelation: Molloy and the others came to me the day I
became aware of my own folly. Only then did I begin to write down what I
feel. (Knowlson, 333, 351-2, and 772 n.55). As emphatically set out in
Becketts authorized biography, even though the vision at last initiated the
breakthrough writings of the postwar years meaning that, in Knowlsons
summation, outside reality would be refracted through the filter of his own
imagination a far longer process of stocking Becketts fertile imaginings, of
drawing upon experiences and erudition from the interwar period,
nevertheless meant that, by 1945, the ground had been well-prepared (352-
3).

But in terms of Becketts artistic development, in what did the change

consist? Although there are several fruitful responses to this question
(psychology, material conditions, wartime experiences, the shift to French,
and so on), one largely overlooked by Beckett Studies is phenomenology.
Both interpretative and genetic roads seem to lead back to Husserlian
philosophy, specifically his Ideas I, as mediated by Sartres interwar writings.
In an uncannily biographical and philosophical proximity, then, Beckett
may be said to have arrived at an artistic perspective on phenomenological
psychology. As Sartre imparted to him in 1938, the difference between

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 Limit{e} Beckett 0 | Spring 2010

real and fictional images need not be seen as an unbridgeable chasm, but
as a void to be fruitfully explored. And if Watt can be considered the
workbook for Becketts later fictions, of a last, stumbling exercise in writing
direct experience prior to the postwar frenzy of writing, then it was in this
novel that subject and object first ceased to be viewed as two holes [that]
had been independently burst in the fence separating image and world.
Instead, through the synthesis of subject and object offered especially to
Beckett by Sartres rendering of Husserl in both fiction and non-fiction, an
alternative conclusion first comes into view in Watt: was it not after all just
possible [] the two fences were but one? (159-60)

1 The epigraphs are taken from Edmund Husserls 1929 Cartesian Meditations, trans. D.
Carins (Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague: 1977), and Jean-Paul Sartre, cited in Edith Kerns
Existential Thought and Fictional Technique: Kierkegaard, Sartre, Beckett (Yale University Press,
London: 1970), pp. 7 and vii, respectively. In preparing this chapter, I am grateful for
relevant conversations with John Pilling and Erik Tonning; I also thankfully acknowledge
translations from German provided by Christian Engners and the late Detlef Mhlberger.
Sections of this article also appear in my chapter, But What Was This Pursuit of Meaning,
in This Indifference to Meaning?: Beckett, Husserl, Sartre and Meaning Creation, in
Maude, Ulrika and Matthew Feldman, eds., Beckett and Phenomenology (Continuum, London:
2009). This volume represents the first study in English of Samuel Becketts relationship to
Phenomenology, save perhaps Eugene Kaelins The Unhappy Consciousness The Poetic Plight of
Samuel Beckett: An Inquiry at the Intersection of Phenomenology and Literature (Kluwer, Dordrecht:
1981).
2 See Feldman 2005.
3 See Feldman 2002.
4 See, for example, Nixon and Feldman (eds.), 2009.
5 Examples of manuscripts in print that can be obtained and studied include:

- The edited Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett by Knowlson and Gontarski,

containing manuscripts of Becketts plays;
- Manuscript reproductions of Lessness and several late plays in Rosemary
Pountneys Theatre of Shadows;
- full transcriptions of Becketts notes of Arnold Geulincx in van Ruler, Ulmann
and Wilsons edited Arnold Geulincx Ethics, and of an early notebook used for Dream

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 Feldman | Beckett, Sartre and Phenomenology

of Fair to Middling Women edited by John Pilling, Becketts Dream Notebook; annotated
volumes including Chris Ackerleys Demented Particulars and Obscure Locks, Simple
Keys;
- Bilingual Variorum editions of How It Is by Edouard Magessa OReilly, as well as
Charles Krances Ill Seen Ill Said, Company and A Piece of Monologue;
- Numerous interviews with Beckett, like the recent Beckett Remembering / Remembering
Beckett, edited by Elizabeth and James Knowlson, and biographical accounts like
John Pillings A Samuel Beckett Chronology (See bibliography for bibliographical
details)
6 In Paul Ricouers words, phenomenology is the story of the deviations from Husserl; the

history of phenomenology is the history of Husserlian heresies (qtd. in Moran, 2-3).

7 See Nixon, passim, and Tonning, 30-47.
8 Regarding textual interventions, both novels ostensibly use footnotes for the guidance of

the attentive reader, as with Watts editorial warning on the numbers given for the Lynch
family (The figures given here are incorrect. The consequent calculations are therefore
doubly erroneous, [101, 211]); or Nauseas the text of the undated pages ends here (3).
9 The only Anglophone work treating this intimacy in any detail is found in Sass.
10 In a work published the year previously, Michael Robinson noted that Watts

refusal of things to assume their time-honoured names is a modern dilemma which

has occupied writers since it was first acknowledged by Hofmannsthal, Rilke and
Proust [] Although he is more coherent Roquentin is in a very similar position to
Watt. In the midst of the nameless he too sets to trying names on things. (125-6)

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 Limit{e} Beckett 0 | Spring 2010

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Q. Hoare (Verso, London: 1984)
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and Thought (Basic Books, New York: 1992)
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