Andy Wimbush

PUBLICATIONS

“OMNIPOTENCE AND OMNISCIENCE”: Molloy AND THE END OF Joyceology

An essay published in Beckett and Modernism, eds. Olga Beloborodova, Dirk Van Hulle and Pim Verhulst (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

Abstract: This chapter explores how Samuel Beckett’s novel Molloy marked an important shift in Beckett’s aesthetic allegiances, particularly his relationship to his former mentor James Joyce. It argues that he came to see Joyce’s heroic aesthetic as representative of the same fault that he had, in the 1930s, found in the work of nineteenth-century realist writers such as Jane Austen and Honoré de Balzac: namely, too much mastery over one’s material and a sense of omnipotence and omniscience. In Molloy, I argue, Beckett rejects Joycean heroics in favour of a humble aesthetic of quietist renunciation, unknowing, and powerlessness that he drew from the work of André Gide, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Arthur Schopenhauer. The chapter concludes by arguing that Beckett came to see Joyce’s work as rooted in a Catholic mindset, whereas Molloy is built upon low church, heretical, or anti-Catholic sensibilities found in Gide, Dostoevsky, and also Arnold Geulincx.

HEY PRESTOS AND HUMILITIES: TWO OF BECKETT'S CHRISTS

The Journal of Beckett Studies, April 2016.

Abstract: As well as its oft-noted concern with mysticism and negative theology, Samuel Beckett's work frequently returns to the figure of the incarnate Christ. This article explores two perspectives on Christ that can be found both in Beckett's work and in religious writing from the European middle ages: the triumphant Jesus known as the Christus Victor, and the suffering Jesus, or Ecce Homo. Building on Mary Bryden's work in this area, the article shows that just as medieval writers such as Julian of Norwich, Ludolf of Saxony, and Margery Kempe reject the contemplation of a transcendent or triumphant Jesus in favour of a vision of him on the cross, Beckett's characters seem to prefer to think about Jesus's suffering rather than contemplate his divinity, his miracles, or his resurrection. Although seemingly irreconcilable, the distinction between the kenotic Christ and the victorious Christ is, theologically speaking, a false one, and so both Beckett and his characters have to interpret the crucifixion in a peculiar way: the article reads Beckett's poem ‘Ooftish’ as heretical complaint that the whole thing was a slight-of-hand on God's part, an act of suffering that was staged rather than authentic. The article goes on to propose that the preference for the suffering Jesus on the part of Watt, Molloy, Malone and others is closely linked with Beckett's own aesthetic allegiances. Taking a cue from comments made about Jesus by Murphy and by the Polar Bear in Dream of Fair to Middling Women, the essay argues that the wonder-working, triumphant Jesus was seen by Beckett as analogous to an author who interferes with the natural disorder of his novel, smoothing over its moments of failure and contradiction just as Jesus righted the vicissitudes of death and disease through miracles. The resigned, suffering Jesus, on the other hand, comes closer to the quietist aesthetic – and religious perspective – of André Gide and Fyodor Dostoevsky, writers that Beckett admired and wished to emulate. The article concludes with an analysis of notes made about the crucifixion and aesthetics in Beckett's Watt notebooks, noting this razor's edge in Christological thinking – one which was particularly alive to Christians of the middle ages.

The Pretty Quietist Pater: Samuel Beckett’s Molloy and the Aesthetics of Quietism

Literature and Theology, June 2015.

Abstract: Recent scholarship has highlighted the importance of ‘quietism’ in Samuel Beckett’s personal and artistic development during the 1930s. This article extends this analysis by showing how the ‘pretty quietist Pater’ recited by Moran in Molloy (1951/55) was not Beckett’s invention but rather borrowed from Jean de La Bruyère’s satirical Dialogues sur le quiétisme (1699). The article also shows how Molloy, like Beckett’s early novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women, explores quietism as an aesthetic framework that Beckett drew from André Gide’s critical writing on Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Palaeozoic Profounds: Samuel Beckett and Ecological Time

Humility, Self-Awareness, and Religious Ambivalence: Another look at Beckett’s “Humanistic Quietism”

The Journal of Beckett Studies, 23:2, September 2014.

Abstract: This article provides a commentary on the opaque and often contradictory arguments of ‘Humanistic Quietism’, Samuel Beckett's 1934 review of Thomas MacGreevy's Poems. Using Beckett's complicated relationship to both his own Protestant upbringing and the Catholicism of MacGreevy as a starting point, the article proposes new ways of understanding Beckett's ambivalent comments about MacGreevy's interiority, prayer-like poetry, humility, and quietism. It draws on Beckett's comments on Rilke, André Gide, and Arnold Geulincx, as well as his familiarity with Dante, to unpack the review's dense allusions and make sense of Beckett's aesthetic allegiances.

Biology, the Buddha and the Beasts: The influence of Ernst Haeckel and Arthur Schopenhauer on Samuel Beckett’s How It Is

Published in the essay collection Encountering Buddhism in Twentieth Century British and American Literature, edited by Lawrence Normand and Alison Winch (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).

Excerpt: Samuel Beckett’s novel Comment C'est , published in 1961, and translated as How It Is in 1964, has been most often understood as a parody of the epic narratives of the West, particularly the theodicies and creation myths of Christianity. H.
Porter Abbott has argued that How It Is should be read as a ‘travesty of the epic’, which critiques ‘the deeply held Western proclivity to see “how it is” as design’ (1996, p. 92). Anthony Cordingley points out how the ‘ natural order’, repeatedly cited by the narrator of How It Is, evokes the orders of Aristotle, the Christian Middle Ages, Dante and Milton (2007, p. 185). Critics have also interpreted the novel’s suffering in primarily Christian terms: Pim, the victim of the story, has been seen as a version of the fl agellated Christ (Boxall 2009), and connections have been made between the imagery of the novel and Beckett’s interest in the asceticism of Pascal (Cordingley 2010). But How It Is also contains a clear reference to an ‘eastern sage’, ‘squatting in the deep shade of a tomb or a bo his fists clenched on his knees’ (45; II.12). 1 As Édouard Magessa O’Reilly (2006) suggests, this figure could well be the Buddha. The ‘bo’ is the Bodhi Tree, under which the Buddha attained awakening; the Sanskrit word bodhi means awakening or ‘perfect knowledge’ and bo is its Sinhalese corruption (OED). The presence of this eastern sage suggests that Beckett must have had more than just Western religious narratives and asceticism in mind when he wrote the novel.