Samuel Beckett's How It Is
Philosophy in Translation
- Offers the first comprehensive treatment of Beckett’s most poorly understood novel, identifying the breadth of its philosophical and literary sources
- Makes extensive use of manuscript evidence and newly accessible notes from Beckett’s reading in philosophy
- Guides the reader through Beckett’s philosophical and theological sources, highlighting his innovative and original dialectics between the pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, the Ancient Stoics, the early Church Fathers and desert mystics, seventeenth-century mystics and Rationalists
This book maps out the novel’s complex network of intertexts, sources and echoes, interprets its highly experimental writing and explains the work’s great significance for twentieth-century literature. It offers a clear pathway into this remarkable bilingual novel, identifying Beckett’s use of previously unknown sources in the history of Western philosophy, from the ancient and modern periods, and challenging critical orthodoxies. Through careful archival scholarship and attention to the dynamics of self-translation, the book traces Beckett’s transformation of his narrator’s ‘ancient voice’, his intellectual heritage, into a mode of aesthetic representation that offers the means to think beyond intractable paradoxes of philosophy. This shift in the work’s relation to tradition marks a hiatus in literary modernism, a watershed moment whose deep and enduring significance may now be appreciated.
List of Illustrations
Series Editor’s Preface
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1. A Poetics of Translation: Dante, Gœthe and the Paideia
2. Pythagorean Mysticism / Democritean Wisdom
3. The Physical Cosmos: Aristotelian Dialectics
4. A Comedy of Ethics: From Plato to Christian Asceticism (Via Rembrandt)
5. Mystic Paths, Inward Turns
6. Pascal’s Miraculous Tongue
7. Spinoza, Leibniz, or a World "Less Exquisitely Organized"
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Index
Samuel Beckett’s How It Is: Philosophy in Translation will undoubtedly become another landmark in Beckett studies, one which is particularly relevant to the study of the author’s mature prose and his method of extracting material from philosophical sources.
Samuel Beckett’s How It Is: Philosophy in Translation will undoubtedly become another landmark in Beckett studies, one which is particularly relevant to the study of the author’s mature prose and his method of extracting material from philosophical sources
This is the first guide to Beckett’s darkest and most impenetrable novel. This wonderfully informed commentary based on first-hand knowledge of unpublished manuscripts details the numerous philosophical references contained in How It Is. Cordingley makes us grasp how the strength and the beauty of Beckett’s unforgettable sentences derive from countless hidden references, all the while sketching a new theory of Beckett’s use of philosophy.
Dans ce livre passionnant, Cordingley souligne comment les allusions de Beckett demeurent mélangées, formant des couches successives. Prenant soin d’éviter que l’on puisse identifier une référence unique, Beckett neutralisait les signifiants sédimentés, déployant ses références de manière discrète. Ainsi, au lieu qu’elles affirment leur sens d’origine, elles deviennent la matière première d’une nouvelle création. Cordingley nous invite à appréhender la présence effective et dynamique des allusions au sein de l’œuvre, au lieu de se restreindre à une thèse derridienne qui conduirait à la dissipation de son objet . En effet, Beckett devait en passer par la construction d’une fiction intégrant des motifs tirés des traditions humaniste et religieuse dans l’acte même d’écrire. […] Cordingley y fait une œuvre salutaire, restituant son épaisseur à cette œuvre majeure de Beckett. Il rend palpable l’immense corps de savoir qui nourrit ce livre, et met en relief le dynamisme à l’œuvre entre le sujet et ses voix.
Dans ce livre passionnant, Cordingley souligne comment les allusions de Beckett demeurent mélangées, formant des couches successives. Prenant soin d’éviter que l’on puisse identifier une référence unique, Beckett neutralisait les signifiants sédimentés, déployant ses références de manière discrète. Ainsi, au lieu qu’elles affirment leur sens d’origine, elles deviennent la matière première d’une nouvelle création. Cordingley nous invite à appréhender la présence effective et dynamique des allusions au sein de l’œuvre, au lieu de se restreindre à une thèse derridienne qui conduirait à la dissipation de son objet . En effet, Beckett devait en passer par la construction d’une fiction intégrant des motifs tirés des traditions humaniste et religieuse dans l’acte même d’écrire. […] Cordingley y fait une œuvre salutaire, restituant son épaisseur à cette œuvre majeure de Beckett. Il rend palpable l’immense corps de savoir qui nourrit ce livre, et met en relief le dynamisme à l’œuvre entre le sujet et ses voix.
There are few critical studies that one can identify as outstanding. This is one of the few.
Samuel Beckett’s How It Is. Philosophy in Translation, by Anthony Cordingley […] is the most comprehensive account of Beckett’s impenetrable novel to date, as well as the first book-length monograph devoted to the explanation of its sources. The principal merit of this study is that Cordingley has been able to detect the origin of half-veiled assumptions that are interspersed throughout the text, and at the same time offers a convincing explanation of how Beckett used them poetically and as a means of cultural critique. One of the most remarkable achievements of the study by this Australian scholar is that he has shown that How It Is is, above many other concerns that are also touched upon in the narrative, a novel about education.
Samuel Beckett’s How It Is. Philosophy in Translation, by Anthony Cordingley […] is the most comprehensive account of Beckett’s impenetrable novel to date, as well as the first book-length monograph devoted to the explanation of its sources. The principal merit of this study is that Cordingley has been able to detect the origin of half-veiled assumptions that are interspersed throughout the text, and at the same time offers a convincing explanation of how Beckett used them poetically and as a means of cultural critique. One of the most remarkable achievements of the study by this Australian scholar is that he has shown that How It Is is, above many other concerns that are also touched upon in the narrative, a novel about education.
