Arduous identifications: Proust, Beckett, and the aesthetics of transcription

• Main Author: D'Arcy, Michael
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01-01-2004
• Subjects: British & Irish literature; British and Irish literature; Comparative literature; Romance literature; Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788-1860); Yeats, William Butler (1865-1939)
• ISBN: 0496619918; 9780496619917

Taking as a focal point Samuel Beckett's dialogue with Marcel Proust, this dissertation offers a re-conceptualization of the relationship of literary modernism to philosophical and aesthetic idealisms inherited from the nineteenth century. While the relationship between Proust and Beckett is often understood in oppositional terms, with Beckett seen as demystifying Proust's ideals of unitary subjectivity or aesthetic redemption, my project traces a commonality in their approaches to literary language. I argue that both authors recognize the obsolete nature of inherited ideals of aesthetic reconciliation, and that they each evolve a response to this situation that turns on the deployment of a dualism between phenomena (experience), and spiritual or metaphysical meaning. As it appears in Proust's fiction, this distinction is commonly taken as an idealization of aesthetic form, but I trace a persistent move in Proust's work to situate literary language on the devalorized (temporal, phenomenal) side of a Manichean opposition between existence and meaning, and read Beckett as elaborating on this gesture. While Proust's project is centrally invested in a meditation on the (un)tenability of egalitarian ideals of aesthetic-political integration, Beckett's trajectory has as its starting point an avant-gardist de-privileging of high cultural forms. This attitude has parallels with contemporaneous avant-gardism, but Beckett's position is distinguished by a consistent concern with the impossibility of eliminating a quasi-philosophical dimension of literary language, a compulsion to meaning that inheres in literary textuality. Taking into consideration these differing points of departure, my study argues that Proust and Beckett each develop a conception of textuality as indifferent repetition, defined by its alterity to the privileged separation traditionally associated with the philosophical logos. For both authors, this strategy of reduction involves a comparison between the hermeneutics of the writing subject and the finite interpretations of the musical auditor. This conception of the subject evolves in conjunction with a reworking of Arthur Schopenhauer's philosophy, and in making this connection my study reevaluates the importance of Schopenhauer for the literature of this period.