From ‘Gleam’ to ‘Gloom’ - The Volte Face Between the Criticism and Fiction of Samuel Beckett

ONE of more curious aspects of most critical responses ,to Beckett's work is surprising simplicity of their analysis of relationship between Beckett's early criticism and subsequent fiction. Critic after critic has testified to value of Beckett's' critical writings as a guide to preoccupations of his own novels and plays, and yet inspection reveals that a radicaland quite fascinating dichotomy separates assumptions of these two phases of Beckett's writing. As Beckett observed in one of his many reviewsof 1930s. 'Analysis of what a man is not may conduce to an understanding of what he is',1 and an awareness of ways in which Beckett's literary work departs from assumptions of his early criticism seems crucial to an understanding of his response to limits 'of language and perception. Far from unambiguously anticipating primary concerns of his later work, Beckett's early criticism 'advocates literary ideals that his later works successivelytranSgress with· ever more dazzling ingenuity. ' Beckett's Proust. of 1931, is usually singled out as best guide to preoccupations of Beckett's fiction, and no passage has been judged more germane to an understanding of Beckett than the' assertion that only fertile research for artist is 'excavatory, immersive, a contraction of spirit, a descent', so that artist is 'active, but negatively, shrinking from nullity of extra-' circumferential phenomena, drawn in to core of eddy'.2 Beckett contrasts this centripetal impulse with 'centrifugal force of self-fear, self-negation' (p. 66) associated with friendship. One of many distractions from 'core of eddy', friendship appears to be an inauthentic social convention as nefarious to apprehension of essential truth as literary conventions that Beckett, like Proust, scornfully denouncesas ' the miserable statement of line and surface and as 'the grotesque fallacy of a realistic art' and 'the penny-a-line vulgarity of a literature of notations' (p. 76)

Aesthetics · Art · Criticism · Gloom · Linguistics · Literary criticism · Literature · Negation · Modernist Literature and Criticism · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Psychology · Samuel Beckett and Modernism