Samuel Beckett and the primacy of love

Front matter

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Contents

Acknowledgements—page viii Foreword by Lance St John Butler—ix

Introduction—1

Preliminaries and Proust No Endon sight: Murphy’s misrecognition of love This emptied heart: Watt's unwelcome home A strange situation: self-entrapment in Waiting for Godot

Foreword

Beckett once remarked that he was interested in ‘fundamental sounds’ and the challenge for Beckett critics has been to find a metalanguage in which they can adequately comment on the profound noises of his drama and prose. A number of studies have considered Beckett’s work alongside analogies from philosophy and, more recently, there has been an interest in Beckett as a sort of ‘dud mystic’ and espouser of what in theology is called the Via Negativa. Aesthetically he has been seen as a minimalist minimalist.

But what is ‘fundamental’ can also include the psychological, and there have been several attempts at trying out the mind (rather than the nature of things, or the soul) as the locus of the Beckettian anguish. John Keller, a practising psychoanalyst, has plunged into these bottomless waters with great energy and insight and has written a book that throws more light onto the Beckettian murk, at least for this long-term reader of his work, than has been available before. I came away from reading the manuscript of this book with a sense of clarity and simplicity: whatever else Beckett is about, it now seems to me certain that his work is also a response to childhood trauma and an extended exploration of the effects on human beings of the primal loss.

Keller has the vigour and fearlessness of a scholar with a solid basis in one discipline applying his skills freely in another. What he sees, from the perspective of his own special knowledge, is a series of texts crying out, perhaps almost literally, for a reading that acknowledges one source of the pain to be the separation from goodness (the Mother) that is the lifelong curse of the sensitive mind. The readings he gives of the Beckett works dealt with are highly convincing and in places quite stunning. Beckett Studies, for me at least, will never be quite the same again.

My own interests are leading me towards a Beckett more tormented by God (an absent God, bien entendu) than once people thought he was, but perhaps that is no contradiction of the immense explanatory power

Foreword x of Keller’s thesis; after all where else would Beckett’s sort of God make himself, or, more accurately and fashionably, herself felt than in the endless departures and disappearances of the primal object? There are many Becketts, but this may be the most fundamental of them.

Lance St John Butler Pau, France