ABSTRACT

SAMUEL BECKETT: THE EASTERN INFLUENCE

BY

Stuart Lee Coonin

In this dissertation an Eastern perspective is applied
to Samuel Beckett's canon. The introductory chapter places
Beckett in the context of Oriental aesthetic modes that were
acknowledged by his contemporaries. The following chapters
move backwards from the Nobel Prize-winning author's most
famous (and, I believe, Noh inspired) dramas of the 1950's,
to the novels of the 40' and late 30's (which used the Zen
Buddhist concepts of Samsura and Nirvana), ending with the
earliest poems, stories, and prose pieces (which also illus-
trate Beckett's knowledge of basic Eastern principles). A
brief Afterword explains how Buddhist beliefs may be used
as keys to Beckett's short mystifying creations of recent
years as well as pointing out how essential Eastern philosophy
has become to modern Western thought.

Chapter I begins with a description of the apocalyptic
mood felt by writers during the first decades of the twentieth
century and the way an artistic turning toward the East brought

a renaissance to poetry and drama. Before going on to the

Stuart Lee Coonin

effects of this new movement on William Butler Yeats, Ezra
Pound, and T. S. Eliot, I will provide a short summary of
certain Buddhist principles and ideals. Notes and later
chapters (with accompanying biographical material) will expand
on ideas touched on in this introduction. At the end of the
chapter Beckett's place in the Oriental preoccupations of
his times is established.

The next chapter is divided into three major sections.
The first defining Noh drama as it is utilized in Endgame;
the second part comparing Yeats's and Beckett's very different
understandings of the classic Japanese theatre (illustrated

by The Cat and the Moon and Waiting For Godot, respectively);

 

 

and the last section showing how the Theatre of the Absurd

may be viewed as Western Noh drama. Krapp's Last Tape and

 

Play will be used as examples of Absurd Theatre.
Also divided into three sections, Chapter III shows
how the Buddhist notions of rebirth and cosmic peace unify

Beckett's novels. The trilogy--Molloy, Malone Dies, and

 

The Unnamable--is analyzed in such a respect followed by a

 

handling of one particular novel, Malone Dies, in light of

 

much more specific Zen concepts. This chapter concludes by

relating the lesser known novels (Murphy, Watt, and How It

 

is), commonly described as anti-literature, with the Oriental
ideal of Nirvana.
The last chapter deals with the Buddhist concepts

espoused in Beckett's own graduate thesis Proust along with

Stuart Lee Coonin

the Eastern haiku-like early poems--"Whoroscope," Echo's
Bongsf-and the short stories included in More Pricks Than

On the whole, this dissertation will emphasize facets
of Samuel Beckett's works that have not been dealt with
before. It will also show that he sees the modern world
from a relatively affirmative rather than pessimistic view-

point.

SAMUEL BECKETT: THE EASTERN INFLUENCE

BY

Stuart Lee Coonin

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1974

© Copyright by
STUART LEE COONIN

1974

For Blanche Levin Coonin

ii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to express my deepest appreciation to Professor
Linda Wagner who directed this dissertation and who aided and
encouraged me. I am grateful as well to Professors Victor
Paananen and Victor Howard who read and commented on my work;
and of course to Professor James Pickering who has made my
graduate experience a most beneficial one. Professor Georges

Joyaux has also been helpful.

I am especially indebted to Mr. Robert Knight who

helped me find Godot.

iii

PREFACE

In the following pages an Eastern perspective is
applied to Samuel Beckett's canon. The introductory chapter
places Beckett in the context of Oriental aesthetic modes
that were acknowledged by his contemporaries. The following
chapters move backwards from the Nobel Prize-winning author's
most famous (and, I believe, Noh inspired) dramas of the 1950's,
to the novels of the 40's and late 30's (which used the Zen
Buddhist concepts of Samsura and Nirvana), ending with the
earliest poems, stories, and prose pieces (which also illus-
trate Beckett's knowledge of basic Eastern principles). A
brief Afterword explains how Buddhist beliefs may be used as
keys to Beckett's short mystifying creations of recent years.

Chapter I begins with a description of the apocalyptic
mood felt by writers during the first decades of the twentieth
century and the way an artistic turning toward the East brought
a renaissance to poetry and drama. Before going on to the
effects of this new movement on William Butler Yeats, Ezra
Pound, and T. S. Eliot, I will provide a short summary of
certain Buddhist principles and ideals. Notes and later
chapters (with accompanying biographical material) will expand
on.ideas touched on in this introduction. At the end of the
chapter Beckett's place in the Oriental preoccupations of his

times is established.
iv

The next chapter is divided into three major sections:
the first defining Noh drama as it is utilized in Endgame;
the second part comparing Yeats's and Beckett's very different
understandings of the classic Japanese theatre (illustrated

by The Cat and the Moon and Waiting For Godot, respectively);

 

and the last section showing how the Theatre of the Absurd

may be viewed as Western Noh drama. Krapp's Last Tape and

 

Play will be used as examples of Absurd Theatre.
Also divided into three sections, Chapter III shows
how the Buddhist notions of rebirth and cosmic peace unify

Beckett's novels. The trilogy-~Molloy, Malone Dies, and The

 

Unnamable--is analyzed in such a respect followed by a hand-

 

ling of one particular novel, Malone Dies, in light of much

 

more specific Zen concepts. This chapter concludes by

relating the lesser known novels (Murphy, Watt, and How It

 

ls), commonly described as anti-literature, with the Oriental
ideal of Nirvana.

The last chapter deals with the Buddhist concepts
espoused in Beckett's own graduate thesis Proust along with
the Eastern haiku-like early poems--"Whoroscope," Echo's

Bones--and the short stories included in More Pricks Than

 

On the whole, this dissertation will emphasize facets
of Samuel Beckett's works that have not been dealt with before.
It will also show that he sees the modern world from a rela-
tively affirmative rather than pessimistic vieWpoint. .

V

The fact that an Eastern perspective has never been
applied to Beckett's canon is surprising yet nonetheless
true. There has, however, been no shortage of new and
exciting studies of his work. So rich is Beckett's work
that it can be approached in a variety of ways and still
retain its vital and fresh appeal.

Perhaps the most valuable source for an overall

introduction to the Irish writer is Hugh Kenner's A Reader's

 

Guide to Samuel Beckett which covers all the works including

 

the ones in the last few years (Enough 1967, Imagination

 

Dead Imagine 1969, and The Lost Ones 1972). Unfortunately,

 

 

Kenner fails to see any dominating philosophy or central
image that might draw the various plays, novels, and stories
together. Though other books do not cover as many different

works as A Reader's Guide, they do give important overviews.

 

In Samuel Beckett: A New Approach, G. C. Barnard gives a

 

Freudian perspective to Beckett's tramps and outcasts; and

Frederick J. Hoffman's Samuel Beckett: The Language of Self

 

sees these same characters in the context of the "Underground
Man." On a more structural, stylistic level, Michael Robin-

son's The Long Sonata of the Dead, David Hesla's The Shape of

 

 

Chaos, and H. Porter Abbot's The Fiction of Samuel Beckett:

 

Form and Effect are extremely useful in understanding Beckett's

 

unusually avant garde methods of communication. All three
critics handle problems ranging from fragmentation to shifting
verb tenses.

vi

Other critics have analyzed particular plays and
novels from specific philosophic standpoints. For example,
Samuel Beckett by A. Alvarez applies the Existentialists'
theories on the Absurd to the novels as well as the plays;
and Eugene Webb's Samuel Beckett: A Study_of His Novels
attempts to find parallels with such figures as Dante,
Descartes, Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger. A most
interesting work dealing solely with Beckett's early career
is Lawrence E. Harvey's Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic,
which offers important insights into the artist's academic
and philosophic pursuits before his self-imposed exile from
Ireland. Nathan A. Scott, Professor of Theology at the
Divinity School of the University of Chicago, places Beckett
in the philosophic traditions of Immanuel Kant and Freidrich
Nietzche. Interestingly enough, Scott pursues the metaphys-
ical experience of Nothingness adopted by Heidegger in the
1920's and 30's but does not make any reference to the Zen
Buddhist Nirvanic connotations. Two important critical
anthologies also deal with specific questions which place
Beckett deeply into twentieth century philosophies. Samuel
Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays edited by Martin
Esslin contains several short studies emphasizing certain
Existential sympathies: "Samuel Beckett and Universal
Parody" by Jean-Jacques Mayoux and "Philosophical Fragments

in the Works of Samuel Beckett" by Ruby Cohn. In Twentieth

 

Century Interpretations of Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable

vii

editor J. D. O'Hara brings together a group of essays that
show Beckett's Nihilistic explorations, yet, here again, no
mention is made of any Eastern influences. Of particular
interest are Northrop Frye's "The Nightmare Life in Death,"
John Fletcher's "Malone 'Given Birth To Into Death'", Franco
Fanizza's "The Word and Silence in Samuel Beckett's The

Unnamable" and Richard N. Coe's "God and Samuel Beckett."

 

Although not a critical anthology, Angels of Darkness:

 

Dramatic Effect in Samuel Beckett with Special Reference to

Eugene Ionesco by Colin Duckworth works with a wide variety

 

of Existential and Absurdist aspects in the plays. Ihab

Hassan's The Literature of Silence: Henry Miller and Samuel

 

Beckett also deals with philosophic issues in its comparison
of Beckett with another extremely provocative contemporary
figure.

Other anthologies deal exclusively with Beckett's
life and interest in the theatre. They are of service since
no substantial biography has yet been written. Such collec-

tions include Samuel Beckett Now edited by Melvin J. Friedman

 

and John Calder's Beckett at 60. In the former book two

 

essays offer invaluable assistance to anyone interested in
Beckett's impact on the artists of his day: "Robbe-Grillet
As Critic of Samuel Beckett" by Bruce Morrissette and

"Beckett's Metaphysics of Choiceless Awareness" by Rosette

Lamont. In Beckett At 60 such theatrical names as Jack

 

MacGowran, Harold Hobson, Alan Schneider, George Devine,

viii

Harold Pinter and Fernando Arrabal discuss their professional
and personal associations with Beckett--providing innumerable
stories and anecdotes. Alec Reid's All I Can Manage, More
Than I Could: An Approach to the Plays of Samuel Beckett is
less a critical study than a personal look at the plays from
the standpoint of pure theatrics. Many facts about the
directors' outlooks on the various productions and the play-
wright's handling of visual and audio techniques are dis-
cussed in Mr. Reid's study.

Besides comprehensive chronological explorations of
Beckett's entire canon, there are also studies of specific
works. Critics such as Ruby Cohn, Richard Coe, Raymond
Federman, Josephine Jacobsen, John Fletcher, and Francis
Doherty have provided in-depth looks at the poetic implica-
tions of Beckett's particular plays and novels. Along with
William R. Mueller, Josephine Jacobsen probes Beckett's
stylistic techniques in The Testament of Samuel Beckett. With
such chapters as "The Murmur in the Mud,” "The Dimension of
Poetry" and "The Comic Mode" the two critics trace the ways
comedy and poetry unify the Trilogy and earlier novels;
Charles Baudelaire and Charlie Chaplin are only two of the
many artists related to the prose works. John Fletcher's
three books are absolutely necessary to any scholar attempting
to analyze the canon from the standpoint of traditional
Western aesthetic modes; The Novels of Samuel Beckett, Beckett:

A Study of His Plays, and Samuel Beckett's Art are provocative

 

 

ix

analyses of specific novelistic and theatrical techniques which
Beckett has evolved throughout his career. Patrick Murray's

short book The Tragic Comedian is another source which puts

 

Beckett in the contexts of the novel and drama. In chapter
II, "The Cruel Heritage: Beckett and Tradition," Murray

views Waiting_For Godot not as an entirely new and startling

 

theatrical production but as the logical outcome of years of
experiments with theme and technique by other playwrights.

Journey to Chaos by Raymond Federman deals exclusively with

 

Beckett's early short stories and their relation to such
diverse artists as Lawrence Sterne, James Joyce, and Graham
Greene. Though Federman admits that Beckett's fiction is
unorthodox in form, deceptive in its use of language, and
ambiguous in its suggestiveness, he nonetheless analyzes the
works within traditional Western modes. Frances Doherty
compares Beckett with such playwrights as Ionesco, Genet, and

Albee in Samuel Beckett and makes it clear in chapter III

 

that "Theatre of Suffering" draws its roots not only from
Existentialism but also the Bible. Richard N. Coe's Samuel
Beckett ties the playwright to "Baroque Rationalism," Wilhelm
Leibnitz, and Kant. And James Knowlson traces specific imagery
in the dramas with his Light and Darkness in the Theatre of

Samuel Beckett and shows how the playwright purposely divides

 

his scenes and lines into profound contrasting elements.
Within the past few years Ruby Cohn's studies of
Beckett's life as well as his work have provided readers and

X

scholars with practical as opposed to abstract theoretical
approaches. In Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut she stresses
the important elements of language in the novels and plays,
and also goes through detailed accounts of the importance of
French on Beckett's style (going from his years as a student
in Paris to his role as self-translator in recent years). In
Dr. Cohn's latest book Back To Beckett (published in 1973),
the value of the canon's honest entertainment is pursued:

"I call the book Back To Beckett because I always come back

 

to Beckett's works, having read much Beckett criticism, some
Beckett sources, and several Beckett epigones."

In all the recent scholarship and general interest
in Samuel Beckett's work, there has been only a handful of
references to an Eastern influence. Although it is unfor-
tunate that no source is given, John Fletcher in Samuel

Beckett's Art does state that at the time of his first

 

attempts at poetry, Beckett had been reading a book on the
Orient familiar to both Arthur Waley and Ezra Pound. Mr.
Fletcher feels that the following lines from "Alba" (a poem

in Echo's Bones) were inspired by this mysterious book:

 

"grave suave singing silk/ stoop to the black firmament of

areca/ rain on the bamboos flower of smoke alley of willows.”
Paradoxically, Dr. Supti Sen, Lecturer in English at Basanti
Devi College in Calcutta, views Beckett in typically Western

literary and philosophical terms in Samuel Beckett: His Mind

 

and Art; though he does make the very general comment that-

xi

"Beckett holds the tranquility promised by the Buddha and
other Eastern philosophers as the Beautitude." Dr. Sen does
not elaborate. On the whole scholars see no relation between
Japanese Noh drama and Beckett's plays, nor do they see
parallels between haiku and his poems.

Two extremely helpful bibliographical studies should
be mentioned in conclusion: Raymond Federman and John
Fletcher's Samuel Beckett: His Works and His Critics and
James Tanner and J. Don Vann's Samuel Beckett: A Checklist

of Criticism. However, no mention is made in either of them

 

of Oriental influences. The following dissertation will

remedy this critical dearth.

xii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION .

The modern apocalptic mood is described and the
consequent turning toward the East is related.
A short history of the Oriental influence on
major writers is given including William Butler
Yeats, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. (Notes will
be helpful.) Samuel Beckett's role in the
modern era's Eastern preoccupation is intro-
duced.

CHAPTER II: NOH DRAMA AND THE PLAYS . . . . . . . . . 22

Noh drama is defined through Endgame and a com-
parison of Yeats's and Beckett 5 use of it is
illustrated in The Cat and the Moon and Waitin
For Godot. In the last section NOh drama is
related to the Theatre of the Absurd using
Krapp's Last Tape and Play as points of refer-
ence.

CHAPTER III: NIRVANA AND SAMSURA IN THE NOVELS . . . 64

After a brief biographical and historical sum-
mary, the Trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, and The
Unnamable) is studied through The Buddhist con-
cepts of reincarnation and cosmic peace. More
specific Zen notions are then related using
Malone Dies in particular. In the concluding
part, the Anti-Novel in general is compared to
Oriental aesthetics; Murphy, Watt, and How It Is
are used as examples.

 

 

 

CHAPTER IV: EASTERN INFLUENCE ON THE EARLY WORKS--
ROUST, POEMS, AND SHORT STORIES . . . . 102

Preliminary biographical material is given.

Beckett's thesis Proust is seen through com-
parisons with Zen Buddhism, after which the

xiii

Page

poems--"Whoroscope" and Echo's Bones--are
viewed in light of basic Oriental ideals

, including haiku. In the last section the
short stories in More Pricks Than Kicks are
analyzed in the Eastern perspective.

 

 

CONCLUSION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157

Summary of preceding chapters and an over-
view of Beckett's basic point of view through-
out his career is given.

AFTERWORD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164

The brief minor works including the most
recent Imagination Dead Imegine and The
Lost Ones are put in an Eastern perspec-
tive. A personal (Orientally inspired)
view of the importance of Beckett's work
and the East to the twentieth century
concludes this part.

 

 

NOTES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS CITED . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134

xiv

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION.

In twentieth century literature the questions of man's
inner state--his Soul or Self--have greatly influenced plot,
character development and setting. J. Alfred Prufrock's
meagre existence, as pitiful and spiritually empty as the
famous "coffee spoons," is much more important and 'relevant'
to the thinking reader than overblown romances, rags-to-riches
success stories, and transcendental reflections garnished with
flowery descriptions of nature.

The turn of the century saw Freud replace Christ and,
for a new generation of artists and intellectuals, a profound
senSe of self-consciousness became a way of life. In an age of
science and technology, the modern writer has come to realize
that material progress can never become a viable substitute for
spiritual belief. Contemporary man, without God and devoid of
faith, has become the "Politic, cautious, and meticulous" pro-
tagonist of an absurd drama. Bereft of a soul and stripped of
religion, the modern literary hero has ”seen the moment of
[his] greatness flicker” and is afraid.

The twentieth century artist is certainly the product
of his age. He is the spokesman for an era that has literally

l

seen the apocalypse and a world that finds itself insufficient
in coping with overpowering desolation. When D. H. Lawrence
wrote in 1920 "The cataclysm has happened, we are among the
ruins,"1 he spoke for a generation that had experienced a

war fulfilling Isaiah's prophetic vision: "The earth mourns
and withers,/. . . the heavens languish together with the
earth./ The earth lies polluted/ Under its inhabitants."2
The title of a poem written in 1922 exposes a world tragically
reminiscent of the preceding biblical prediction: "A heap

of broken images, where the sun beats,/ And the dead tree

gives no shelter, the cricket no relief . . ." (The Waste

 

Land, 11.22-23). Isaiah's forecast of a "solitary . . . for-
tified city . . . a habitation deserted and forsaken . . . a
people without discernment"3 comes into its own with T. S.
Eliot's well known lines:

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many,

Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,

And each man fixed his eyes before his
feet. (The Waste Land, 11.22-25)

 

The deserted midnight streets of New York, the razed blocks
of Hiroshima, and the barbed wire fields of Auschwitz are
just as symbolic of modern man's soul as they are of his
world. Writers such as Ezra Pound, T. 8. Eliot, Albert Camus
and Jean-Paul Sartre reveal the bleak, "gray, gray" landscape
of the age and constantly remind us that 'God is truly dead'.

The playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd communicate a-

humor of hopelessness, a diatribe of despair. Their message
of life's meaninglessness cannot help but affect their medium.
Paradoxically, the apocalyptic, Absurdist point of
view-~far from discouraging art--has produced new creative
modes in poetry, prose and drama. Jean Genet has written:
”Art blossoms from the wound of loneliness, and offers itself
to the innumerable nation of the dead."4 The Theatre of the
Absurd and Anti-Art in general seek ways to rid themselves of
corpselike conventions that no longer convey the modern exper-
ience. Just as Samuel Beckett has abandoned his mother tongue
to write in a language that demands uncompromising attention
to style and structure as well as thematic content, the con-
temporary artist avoids traditions that no longer seem valid
in the abyss. In approaching the questions and problems of
his era the existentialist artist, for example, realizes
that his means of expression must suit the chaos and sterility
which he invariably discovers. Thus, the experimental activi-
ties of contemporary poets, novelists, and dramatists is
indicative not only of a need for a more seminal manner of
dealing with art but also of a more satisfying way of finding
individual worth in the atomic age. Outdated moralities,
time worn phiIOSOphies, and religious clichés are the "heap
of broken images" at the heart of the modern Waste Land.
Unfortunately, Western civilization has arrived at a
rationality that blinds itself to the spiritual. Consequently,

Occidental society reaps the bitter, unsatisfying fruits of

materialism. Modern literature focuses on this state of
affairs and, interestingly enough, offers an alternative.

In its ever broadening perspectives such a literature is not
afraid to break with artistic conventions and bourgeois plati-
tudes in order to seek aesthetic, philosophic realms that
bridge the modern abyss. The urgency of man's spiritual needs,
the proddings of his subjective will, and the hunger of his
emaciated soul can no longer be held in check by cracking

Cartesian theories and obtuse scientific blinkers.

Carl Jung states that "while we are overpowering the
Orient from without . . . with our technical proficiency . . .
the East with its psychic proficiency . . . may be fastening

5 The art of William Butler

its hold upon us from within."
Yeats, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Samuel Beckett--to name
just a few--delves into truths harbored for centuries by

China, Japan, and India but generally overlooked by a genera-
tion that had been nursed in the Industrial Revolution, spanked
by the severe morality of Victorianism, and mortally wounded

by the chaos of the First World War. When the bullets stopped,
the poison gas cleared, and the millions of dead in the
trenches were counted, the twentieth century writer found a
need to abolish outmoded frills and conventions. Whether he
liked it or not, the modern artist found himself beyond nine-

teenth century literary pretensions and, most importantly,

adrift of any religious faith. By turning toward the East

he discovered a culture that rested on inner values--values
that stressed spiritual development rather than external
progress. In his 1926 The Decline of the West Oswald Spen-
gler was to write: "Scientific worlds are superficial worlds,
practical, soulless and purely extensive worlds."6 More

recently, William Barrett, in Irrational Man: A Study of

 

Existential Philosophy, (1958) has said that "the modern
artist sees man not as the rational animal, in the sense
handed down to the West by the Greeks, but as something else."7
Samuel Beckett and other writers in the first decades of the
century realized that this "something else" might very well
have its origins in the Orient.

It is the overall contention of this thesis that with
a better understanding of Eastern faith one can more fully
come to grips with twentieth century literature. As will be
shown later in this chapter, evidence supporting the vast
influence of the Orient on leading European and American
artists of the modern era is quite substantial. The sub-

sequent chapters, however, will deal solely with the works

of Samuel Beckett.

Before proceeding further it will be necessary to
explain certain principles basic to Oriental cosmology, for
it is clear that they hold a particular attraction for con-
temporary artists. Such an explanation is difficult since

Buddhism, the chief religion of the Far East, claims a

special transmission outside of scripture. Having little or
no dependence on words, Buddhism supposedly originates directly
from man's accord with his true Self. It is a religion
deeply involved with personal experience--ceremonial rites
are minimal and dogmatic encumbrances are practically non-
existent. By realizing this subjective aspect of Eastern
religion (an aspect that differs dramatically from doctrinal
Judeo-Christianity), Western artists have become more and
more aware that consciousness with its universal (Oriental)
connotations may be seen as a spiritual entity. This aware-
ness has led to increased emphasis on the first person
narrator and his excrutiatingly painful and personal revela-
tions. (In brief, the strictures of plot, like the authori-
tative tenets of Christianity, gave way at the beginning of
the century to the ultimate reality of the Self.) Essentially,
the 'knower' in Buddhism, not the 'known', is the source of
divine wisdom or Enlightenment. The reliance on Self in
Oriental religion does not, however, lead to anarchy since
man transcends the dualistic, temporal world of right and
wrong, good and evil in order to enter into the 'realm of
timeless knowledge' where purity of action, as well as thought,
is supreme. He becomes at one with the cosmos.

The death of the authoritarian white-bearded God of
the West would make no sense to the Easterner for he believes
that the soul--which is much more real and immediate than

the secular--is the fundamental truth. In the Orient, heaven

is an internal state. A Zen quote illustrates this belief:
"Just as the moon only reflects its light in a pool, so the
mind, empty and unattached, does not know itself and the out-r
side world as two things."8
Michaelangelo's masterpieces as well as the great

Gothic churches, with their magnificent stained glass windows,

were made to objectively imply the word of God. Eastern art,

 

on the other hand, is not a manifestation or symbolic repre-

sentation; it is intimately associated with contemplative

 

intuition. With the disintegration of religion after World

 

War I, the Western artist experimented with a purer aesthetic
related to his new autonomous consciousness. Paintings of
nature's loveliness, poems of measured rhyme, and novels of
progressive plot could no longer convey reality as the

modern artist saw it. Naturalistic description could no
longer contain the torment, confusion and loneliness that

the twentieth century writer felt. For example, just as

the interior motivation of Indian, Chinese and Japanese
beliefs appeal to the spiritual rather than material side

of man, the perfectly structured rhyme scheme becomes less
necessary as the poem's (and man's) incorporeal essence is
explored. A definition, or at least appreciation, of this
essence has become an aim of the most meaningful twentieth
century creative endeavors. Like Buddhism, such art "awakens
a . . . consciousness beyond the empirical, reflecting,

knowing, willing and talking ego."9 The Orient offered the

Occidental writer a sorely needed means to relate to a con-

fused, spiritually sterile age.

The use of Buddhism, Indian mysticism, and Oriental
art forms in the West has increased demonstrably since the
end of the nineteenth century. Hungry for some kind of faith
and desirous of cultivating the spiritual side of his nature,
artists, at the turn of the century, became profoundly aware
of the East. William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, and T. S.
Eliot were Samuel Beckett's contemporaries; they all realized
the immense potential influence of the Orient on modern
Western poetry and drama.

In the closing years of the nineteenth century, the
Impressionist painters, headed by Monet, used Oriental tech-
niques in color and style to enrich their works. Chinese
silks, fans, ceramics and novelties became the vogue of
Europe, and contacts with the East increased sharply. In
particular, the refined lines of the Japanese artist's graphic
style along with his subtle use of foreshortening and enig-
matic simplicity won the complete approval of such artists
as Pierre Renoir, Edgar Degas, and Camille Pissarro. Monet
exclaimed that "their [the Japanese artists'] aesthetic code
. . . evokes presence by means of a shadow, the whole by
means of a fragment."10 Eventually the sensuous imagery of
the East broke down many Western prejudices concerning

'realism'. Oriental art also helped the Impressionists to

discover that the creator's mind and emotions were just as
important as the subject itself. With the dawn of the
twentieth century, writers also found the precepts of Asian
aesthetic modes to be easily applicable in their own endeavors.
The French, most notably Andre Malraux and Paul Valery, were

quite receptive to Oriental thought.11

They studied trans-
lations of haiku poetry, promoted Noh theatre and often
toured Far Eastern capitals. In other countries, artists
shared their preoccupation. Lawrence Binyon studied Chinese
and Japanese painting, and in 1911 published The Flight of
the Dragon: An Essay on the Theory and Practice of Art in
China and Japan Based on Original Sources. He writes:

We note in their conception of art a much greater

stress laid on the subjective element. "The secret

3f art? says the twelfth centTEy critic Kuo Jo-hsu,

lies 1n the artist himself.

Ernest Fenellosa spent the major part of his life in the
Orient studying Japanese culture in particular. "A little
school of devotees of the Noh grew up in London" writes
Eustice Mullins, "including Pound, Yeats, Arthur Waley, and

13

Edmund Dulac." Florence Farr, mistress of George Bernard

Shaw and William Butler Yeats, exiled herself to Ceylon near

the end of her life--"The logical outcome" writes Stanley

Weintraub, "of her long interest in Eastern thought."14 In

a letter to Sturge Moore (who was himself an avid Noh ad-

mirer), Yeats wrote in 1915 "I am deep in a new Noh play

15

myself." And in America, where Emerson and Whitman had .

10

already acknowledged the wisdom of the Orient, a young T. S.
Eliot was applying himself to Sanskrit.16 Consequently,
empirical means of perception and creation, valued for so
long in the Occident, were seriously questioned and often
rejected by an extremely critical, self-conscious, and
'Easternized' generation of writers, poets, and playwrights
directly before and after World War I. By the 1920's and
30's, London and Paris were the centers of an avant-garde
whose exposure to Oriental aesthetics would play an integral
part in the techniques of modern literary forms.

The works of William Butler Yeats are illustrative
of the Oriental influence on major writers in Europe during
the first decades of the century. For Yeats, as seen in
his poetry and drama, the world of spirituality and mysticism
had not completely lost its hold on human consciousness,
although he is also very much aware of his Western heritage.
In his poem "Under Ben Bulben" the achievements of Occidental
civilization are challenged-~its ideals having long been
'profaned' or destroyed by the gods of rationalism, materia-
lism, and progress:

Measurement began our might;

Forms a stark Egyptian thought,
Forms that gentler Phidias wrought.
Michael Angelo a proof.

Till her bowels are in heat.

Proof that there's a purpose set

Before the secret working mind17
Profane perfection of mankind.

11

With the preceding lines, one realizes how removed Western
concepts are from those of the East. The former is concerned
with "Measurement," "Forms," and "Proof" while the latter
places its faith in a much more subjective methodology. To
be sure, Yeats was steeped in Romantic notions (the effects
of his immersion in Shelley and Keats are more than apparent)
and his debt to the Pre-Raphaelites is clearly seen in his
interest in the Middle Ages and aesthetic exploration of
magic and mysticism. But his use of Oriental poetic and
dramaturgical ideas is also undeniable and proved most in-
fluential on writers of the following generation.

Yeats's most important borrowing from the East was
the tradition of Noh drama. In using this ancient Japanese
dramatic mode in such plays as At the Hawk's Well (1917) and

The Dreaming_ef the Bones (1919), Yeats struggled to re-

 

establish the theatre--especially in Ireland--as a meaning-
ful, powerful art form. As will be shown in detail in the
following chapter, the Japanese theatre offered him a time-
honored aesthetic in which he could escape or expand on
Western conventions. Yeats, like the Impressionists before
him, realized that his creations needed new techniques in
order to survive; he refused to allow the stale artistic
methods of English culture to inhibit him. Although Yeats
never appreciated Eastern philosophy as fully as Pound, he

valued its aesthetic techniques and found them necessary to

12

his particular purposes. In 1930 he wrote "It is now time
to copy the East and live deliberately."18
Like W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound was fascinated with
the possibilities of the Noh dramatic form in Western theatre,
yet his greatest achievement in using Oriental modes is in
poetry. His dream was that East could meet West through the
language of art. In the 1910's, at the time Yeats was working
on his first Noh play, Ezra Pound began his translations of
Ernest Fenellosa's detailed notes on Chinese and Japanese
Art. His labors did not go unnoticed. T. 8. Eliot called
Pound's translations "fantastic translucencies" and in 1928
wrote: "it must be pointed out that Pound is the inventor

of Chinese poetry for our time."19

Ford Madox Ford, who
found Pound's "Exile's Letter" especially moving, declared
Cathay (which contained fourteen Eastern inspired poems)

"a most beautiful book."20

The Oriental influence would,
in later years, find expression in the Chinese ideograms of
Pound's Cantos but it is with the emergence of vers libre in
the second decade of the century that one can already see

how effectively haiku swept Western poetry. In The Pound

 

Era Hugh Kenner is prompted to say that "composition a l

chinoise was one of the directions the vers-libre movement,

 

guided by current intuitions of beauty, was fated to

"21
explore. . .

Though it has been noted by experts on
Chinese and literary critics alike that Ezra Pound's trans-

lations were far from scholarly or even accurate, it is

13

generally agreed that they served the purpose of introducing
a new, Eastern perspective to the poetry of the times. The
Easterner's stress on simplicity, inner control, and spiri-
tual reflection on the most everyday objects and events gave
the Western playwright (through Noh drama) and poet (through
haiku) a new set of survival tactics. By looking inward,
Pound and his fellow poets could use the "vivid conscious-
ness" of mind and nature (which, to the Oriental mind were
one and the same) to give new life and style to their crea-
tions. In the first decades of the twentieth century it
seemed that the Orient could offer the best insights into
this 'consciousness'. .

The close association between T. 8. Eliot and Ezra
Pound has never been more widely appreciated than in recent
years with the realization of the latter's great editorial

effect on The Waste Land. But perhaps more important than

 

this specific instance of artistic collaboration is the
common respect the two men shared for the Asian world. In

Four Qeartets, for example, the Oriental influence is almost

 

as striking as it is in the ideograms of the Cantos: "I
sometimes wonder if that is what Krishna meant" ("The Dry
Salvages,” III). And in "Burnt Norton" part V: "Only by

the form, the pattern,/ Can words or music reach/ The still-
ness, as a Chinese jar still/ Moves perpetually in its
stillness."22 The Oriental hesitation to set theoretic,
dogmatic answers to metaphysical questions is echoed through-

out Eliot's works and is particularly noticeable in The

14

haehe hahe, written at approximately the same time that
Yeats was working on his Noh dramas and Pound was completing
his translations of Fenellosa. In this most provocative and
influential poem, the "Fire Sermon" parallels Buddha's
message of the same name and the spectral crowds of people
seem passively moved by what a Buddhist would call Samsura--
the wheel of life. The last words of the poem--"Shantih
shantih shantih"--reveal the Eastern tenor of the times for
they allude to a Peace which is beyond understanding and,
thus, beyond the Western context of rational, logical thought.
Eliot's philosophic Oriental affiliations lasted
throughout his career, despite the obvious Anglican ties.
The Nirvana-like mystery of certain poems is encompassed
by imagery connotative of Zen: "In my beginning is my end"
("East Coker," I); "heard, half heard, in the stillness/

Between two waves of the sea" ("Little Gidding," V).23

T. 8. Eliot, Ezra Pound and William Butler Yeats
moved in the same London and Parisian circles that Samuel
Beckett was most familiar with in the 1920's and 30's, yet
for many readers and critics Beckett has stood in what John

Fletcher calls "splendid isolation."24

For example, the
similarities between WaitingFor Godot and Yeats's Noh
dramas have never been discussed by literary critics. To
be more specific, the distinct parallels between Beckett's

first play in 1953 and The Cat and the Moon (1926) cannot

15

but lead one to suspect that James Joyce's deep regard for
Yeats certainly rubbed off on his young Irish protogé,

(A detailed comparison of the two dramas will be made in
the following chapter.) In his poem "The Circus Animals'
Desertion" Yeats writes: "Those masterful images because
complete/ Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?"25 The
main point of this thesis is that the East spawned Samuel
Beckett's own "masterful images"( in poetry, prose, and
drama) during his literary 'apprenticeship' in the English
and French capitals.

In the early thirties, James Joyce paid Beckett one
of his rare compliments--"I think he has talent."26 The
young Irishman's talent certainly rested on his ability to
absorb interesting new trends and make them into creations
uniquely his own. Noh drama in Beckett's plays will be
carefully analyzed as well as certain Buddhist principles
in the novels, short stories and early poems. It will be
shown that the Anti-Novel as well as the Theatre of the
Absurd share many characteristics with Oriental art. The
Asian concepts of Samsura, Nirvana, the Eightfold Path of
Suffering, and love will be defined and applied when their
relation to Samuel Beckett's canon is noteworthy.

The present introduction should make it clear,
however, that even if Beckett was not aware of the Japanese
and Chinese preoccupations of his contemporaries, he was

atleast expressing thoughts and emotions that can be better

16

understood if at last viewed in an Eastern context. For
instance, though Beckett may never have formally studied the
abstract nature of the Buddhist state of Nirvana, he could,
like Marcel Proust, identify with the Self (or metaphysical
consciousness) that such a state implies. Thus, in dis-
cussing Nirvana, the enigmatic, mystical ambitions of such
characters as Murphy and Malone come into new focus. Such

seemingly complex, allusive dramas as WaitingFor Godot and

 

Endgame take on an even more profound significance when
their often confusing, even nightmarish qualities are com-
pared with features of the classical Japanese Noh drama:
Hamm and Clov's ambiguous relationship in the latter play
becomes much more intelligible if looked at from the char-
acters' respective roles as ehTTe and gehT. The early poems
and short stories, as well, evoke Beckett's bent toward
artistic principles advocated in haiku and his definitely
Eastern inspired fascination with irony and paradox. In
his Master's thesis, Proust, the definitions of Time, Memory,
Consciousness and Self also have Oriental rather than Occi-
dental roots. A detailed analysis of the preceding parallels
has never been undertaken before and with the growing Western
interest in Asian mysticism and philosophy such an analysis
brings Samuel Beckett's works to the forefront of the contem-
porary scene.

Before discussing the Oriental connotations of the

plays, novels, short stories, and poems it should be repeated

17

that Beckett himself has never documented evidence~eletters,
diaries, interviews-~which could be considered positive proof
of an intentional, conscious literary leaning to Eastern
thought. Such a dearth, however, is not surprising when one
considers Mr. Beckett's elusiveness and reticence about
explanations of his own work. "I refuse to be involved in

27

exegesis of any kind,” he wrote to director Alan Schneider

after the American premiere of Waiting For Godot. He has

 

stood firm in this declaration. In the aforementioned play,
the "Crrritic" is associated with the "moron," "sewar rat,"
"cretin," and a host of assorted "vermin."28
Yet Beckett's close-mouthed attitude towards expli-
cations of his works has certainly not lessened the mounting
interest in his seemingly gloomy philosophic outlook and,
at times, almost schizophrenic writing style. British
publisher John Calder has predicted that by the year 2000
Beckett will rank only behind Christ, Napoleon, and Wagner

29 An Eastern

in the number of books written about him.
approach will throw light on the whirlpool of contradictions,
complexities, and questions that have been at the heart of

Beckett's literary output since his 'overnight' success with

Waitithor Godot in the mid 1950's.

 

Most importantly, it should be kept in mind that
the popular misconception of Samuel Beckett's apathetic
critical attitude, often obscure poetic style, and at times

monotonous obsessive-compulsive prose technique is not

18

without foundation if the works are looked at from a purely
Western aesthetic viewpoint. In his Approach to the Plays
of Samuel Beckett, Alec Reid says that imposing form and
order on Beckett is like carrying sulphuric acid in a tin.30
Hugh Kenner states that listening to scholars and critics
"we might well suppose that the substance of the play [Godot]
was some elusive idea or other, and not a very well expressed
idea since there is so much disagreement about what it is."31
The general public, along with the professionals, is equally
baffled. Jeremy Kingston, theatre reviewer for England's
Punch magazine, worked for the Criterion Theatre when Waiting
For Godot opened and recalls in a recent interview with this
student that

the critics at the time didn't know what to make of

it--I certainly didn't know what to make of it . . .

and it did tremendously bad business--hardly anyone

came at all! . . . People who did come would stomp

out a half hour after the opening lines, throwing

their tickets and saying "It's rubbish" . . . Peter

Bull, the original Pozzo, was insulted many times

a week from the audience by people saying "I wish

that fat man would stop talking," and Peter Bull

would look around to figure out if there was any-

one fatter than himself on the stage to whom it

could apply.32

With the realization, however, that Samuel Beckett

has created a new type of theatre and is exploring meta-
physical questions that have rarely been posed in Western
art, a better appreciation of his enormous talent and deep
significance can be acquired. Unfortunately, an analysis

of what has been called his "magic," "spell," and "poetic '

19

communication" usually flounders in a sea of gushy abstrac-
tions by critics who "admire the courage and purity of his

33 Beckett's

effort" but are unable to define or digest it.
outrageous characters, fantastic plotlessness, and pessi-
mistic themes of loneliness and alienation are, of course,
hopelessly beyond the perceptions of conventional audiences
who expect the dramatist to be the master of a complete,
rational philosophy answerable to all of their problems.
Bewilderment, incredulity, anger and contempt will plague
critics as well as audiences until this greatest of modern
playwrights is viewed within the environment of his age--

an age that in turning away from pat, superficial traditions

asks questions that have been at the basis of Oriental life

and art for at least a thousand years.

To sum up, the concerns and themes expressed in

Samuel Beckett's work pertain to the decay of Western values.
The two tramps in Waiting For Godot have become symbols of
the modern artist and his society. They see the absurdity
of existence, the meaninglessness of communication, and the
utter hopelessness of religion--yet they wait, continue to
talk, and manage to create moving images that poetically
define the passage of time, the sorrows of human desires

and that spiritual irrationality that sets man above the
animals. These themes have also been at the core of Zen

Buddhist art for centuries and now, more than ever, deserve

20

the attention of Western audiences and readers. In Godot,
Vladimir and Estragon wait for a Power or Presence that
lies beyond their ordinary sphere of meaninglessness and
despair. In his acknowledgement of their hope, Beckett seems
to be saying that man, for all his selfishness and suffering,
has never lost his spiritual cravings.
The contradiction between the West's objectivity

and the East's mysticism is paralleled in the Beckettian
characters' obsessive physical preoccupations and in their
simultaneous belief in figures or states that transcend the
body. The West's predicament is summed up in Beckett's
monograph on Proust:

Habit has laid its veto on . . . perception, its

action being precisely to hide the essence--the

idea--of the object in the haze of conception-

preconception. . . . The creature of habit turns

aside from the object that cannot be made to

correspond with one or other of his intellectual

prejudices, that resists the propositions of his

team of synthesis, organised by Habit on labour-
saving principles.

The Oriental cosmology attempts to distill this essence of
man's existence. "Gazing at the reflection of the moon in.
a clear pool" says the Zen Buddhist, "I see beyond my form,
my real form."35 Such consciousness goes beyond traditional
Western concepts of logic and reason but has always been
upheld in Samuel Beckett's writings:

When the object is perceived as particular and

unique and not merely the member of a family,

when it appears independent of any general

notion and detached from the sanity of cause

. . . then and then only may it be a source of
enchantment. (Proust, pp. 22-23)

21

The urge to grasp at 'general notions' and cling to estab-
lished literary 'conception-preconceptions' is especially
strong when first coming to the "gray, gray" world of
Beckett's works. Such crutches must be abandoned in order
to fully recognize the inherent value of the artist's
special vision. William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, and T.
S. Eliot have, at one time or another, focused their artis-
tic visions with an Oriental lens. Samuel Beckett, as will

be shown, is no exception.

CHAPTER II

NOH DRAMA AND THE PLAYS

This chapter, in three parts, will examine Samuel
Beckett's plays in the context of Japanese Noh Theatre. It
will first be necessary to define the stylistic and thematic
principles at the foundation of Noh drama: Endgame (1957)
will be compared to these basic principles. Once these
underlying structural concepts have been explained, the
next part of the chapter will treat Beckett's handling of
the more philosophic Zen-Buddhist connotations of Noh by a
comparison with William Butler Yeats's somewhat more sim-
plistic grasp of Oriental stage conventions: Waiting For
92922 and Yeats's The Cat and the Moon (1926) will be the
main plays considered. The third and last part of this

chapter will explore Beckett's shorter dramas-~Krapp's Last

 

Tepe (1958), Happy_Days (1961), and gTay_(l967)--in terms
of Noh dramaturgy and will also develop the idea that the
Theatre of the Absurd, in which Beckett is a key figure,
may be informatively viewed as 'Western Noh drama'.

All the above-mentioned plays bring to Western
theatre a style, eloquence, and aesthetic motivation that
have been encompassed in Japanese theatre for six centuries.

22

23

Samuel Beckett's reliance on the pantomimic skill of his
actors, pregnant "pauses" in the midst of poetic dialogue,
and 'plots' turning on reflection rather than action reveal
a theatrical approach that is typically Eastern. It is
fairly safe to assume, in the context of his times, that
Beckett's particular approach to the theatre is the result
of both profound Oriental influences (similar to those felt
by Yeats, Pound and T. 8. Eliot) and an inevitable trans-
formation of Occidental drama that was necessary for its

survival in the modern age.

To begin on a very physical level, Beckett uses

his stage in a manner strikingly reminiscent of theatrical
techniques employed by Zeami, the founder of Noh. In essence,
Zeami's stage becomes the entire universe. Near the begin-
ning of Endgame, Hamm's instructions to Clov on how to
move his wheelchair--"Take me for a little turn . . . Right
round the world!"1--parallel the Noh actor's movements on
stage, where space tends to be treated nonrealistically and
theatrically. The "bare interior" of Beckett's play is also
in keeping with "most of the Noh plays [which] are completely
devoid of stage scenery. It is the words recited . . . or
the change in position or pose . . . that is calculated to
conjure up in the mind of the audience--now the interior of
a palace, now an outing under the canopy of cherry-blossoms.

."2 Although the set and the "gray light" remain con-I

stant, Hamm is capable of taking the audience to the edge

24

of the abyss, Nagg and Nell to their idyllic lake in Switzer-
land, and Clov to the mysterious (hell's) kitchen where a
rat lies half dead.

Being placed in such a macrocosmic stage environment,
it is little wonder that Hamm and his Noh cousins share a
similar point of view. In Kongo Yagoro's fifteenth century
drama Torioi-bune (The Bird-scaring Boat), Hanawaka stands

at his fixed position on stage and sees himself in relation

to his surroundings:

Grieving we wait, uncertain as
waterfowl,

On waves that toss us about,

And doubts cluster round us,
countless . . .

Each perception tells the truth

That we ourselves are bubbles, 3

Froth dissolving on the waves. . .

Hanawaka's reflections are shared by Hamm, who foresees his
own final, solitary place on stage (and in the universe)

while addressing Clov:

Infinite emptiness will be all
around you, all the resurrected
dead of all the ages wouldn't

fill it, and there you'll be

like a little bit of grit in the
middle of the steppe . . . Well
you'll lie down then, what the
hell! Or you'll come to a stand-
still, simply stop and stand still,
the way you are now. (pp. 36-37)

The "standstill" that Hamm refers to seems almost

synonymous with the inaction that characterizes Zeami's

25

drama. In Japanese Theatre, Faubion Bowers describes the

type of movement which is essential to a stage that has

been magnified to universal proportions: "Each step of the
foot and each gesture of the hand are carefully measured

and stylized. Maximum economy of gesture and movement and
complete restraint characterize a performance. Noh abounds

in understatement."4 The extremely simple staging (or
blocking) of Endgame matches this style of drama: Nagg

and Nell remain stationary in their ash-cans, Hamm is doomed
to his wheelchair, and Clov's maneuvers--back and forth from
the kitchen, between the two windows, and beside Hamm's
chair--are confined to a rehearsed pattern. The deliberate
style of traditional Japanese theatre is analogous to Beckett's
play: on numerous occasions Hamm must vigorously remind Clov
to stand beside his chair rather than behind it--"Don't stand
there, you give me the shivers" (p. 32)--and he seems obsessed

with his particular location on stage--

I feel a little too far to the left.
(Clov moves chair slightly.)

Now I feel a little too far to the right.
(Clov moves chair sli htly.)

I feel a’little too far forward.

(Clov moves chair sli htl .)
Now I feel a little too far back.

(Clov moves chair slightly.) (p. 27)
Nagg and Nell's fixed presence on stage, periodically peeping
curt of their cans, does not seem so unusual when one considers

certain staging techniques of Noh: "Convention allows a

26

character to disappear if he withdraws from the playing
area of the stage, where he sits immobile until he is re-

5

quired to appear again." The old couple's relatively

mysterious questions and allusions,

Nagg: Can you see me?

Nell: Hardly. And you?

Nagg: What?

Nell: Can you see me?

Nagg: Hardly.

Nell: So much the better, so much

the better. (p. 15)
though they are hardly more than a yard from each other,
are also explainable in terms of Noh: "By another conven-
tion persons may be presumed to be mutually invisible, even
though only a few feet apart, if they are not facing each
other; this accounts for the master's customary query 'Is
anyone here?' even when his servant is almost within touching
distance."6
Beckett's very plain, unadorned stage is as pro-

foundly meaningful as its Japanese counterpart. Zemmaro

Toki, in Japanese No Playe, explains: "What is left unshown

 

is not mere blank; it is the reverse of emptiness. It is
the type of suggestiveness which . . . may be called Orien-
tal taste."7 Endgame is guided by this same principle of
suggestiveness; the audience is confronted with a void, an
abyss ("Gray. Gray! GRRAY! . . . Light black. From pole

to pole.” (pp. 31-32)) in which the hopes and dreams of

27

life flounder, yet they must make the most of it and find some
meaning (even if it is meaninglessness).

The characters in Noh plays are assigned strict,
prescriptive roles: ehThe (principal character or hero),
32h; (secondary actor or assistant to the ehThe), and £5212
(followers or relatives of the ehTTe). Hamm would fit into
the first role, Clov into the second, and Nagg and Nell into
the last. In short, the cast of Endgame could be conceived
from the principals of Noh drama. "The inanimate, even
deathlike mask worn by the ehThe" says Earle Ernst, "is
brought to a subtle, momentary life by the actor, while the
faces of the unmasked actors are so rigidly expressionless

that they assume the qualities of masks."8

In his descrip-
tion of the opening tableau, Beckett says that Clov "goes he,

Hamm, removes sheet coverihg him . . . Th_e dressing gown,

 

 

e stiff tqgue eh his head, e large bloodstained handkerchief

 

 

over his face . . . Hamm seems Te he asleep." (p. 1). Hamm's

 

 

morgue-like appearance is definitely within the grain of
Noh, where "the role of shite involves both man and spirit
. both life and death."9 Hamm's desire to go back to

sleep, though he has just awakened, may be interpreted as

a death wish: "Enough, it's time it ended . . . Get me
ready. Go and get the sheet." (p. S). "The shite" states

Ernst, "demonstrates the necessity of escape from this world,

the desirability of being done with that part of living

10

which still clings to him." As master and martyr, Hamm,

28

by ending the game and bringing down the curtain, plays the
role of ehTTe to perfection.

Clov, who performs the first series of actions
(inspects the set, readies the props, "removes sheet," etc.),
and utters the first lines, keeps well within the role of
gehT. The chant-like quality of his opening speech and its
significant thematic content are in strong accord with the
waki's function of rhythmically introducing the ehTTe and,
most importantly, the drama's subject matter:

Finished, it's finished, nearly finished, it must
be nearly finished. Grain upon grain, one by one,

and one day suddenly, there's a heap, a little
heap, the impossible heap. (p. l)

Clov's tonelessness and "fixed gaze" give him the rigid,
masked quality of a Noh actor. Just as the EehT serves as
a foil for the dramatic tour de force of the ehThe, Clov
serves as 'straight man' for Hamm's comic-tragic lines.
For example:

Hamm: Do you remember when you came here?
Clov: No. Too small, you told me.
Hamm: Do you remember your father?
Clov: (wearily) Same answer. (Pause)
You ve asked me these questions
millions of times.
Hamm: I love the old questions.
(With fervour)
Ah the old questions, the old
answers, there's nothing like
them! (p. 38)

 

OI‘

Clov: Do you believe in the life to
come?

Hamm: Mine was always that.
(Exit Clov)
Got him That time. (p. 49)

 

29

In essence, the gehT, according to Richard McKinnon in The
No and Zeami, is "the interlocutor, who 'draws out' from the
ehTTe the central theme of the play."11
Nagg and Nell, as EEEES: parallel the interaction

of the main characters, and their ghostly, eerie, white faces
accentuate the death theme of Endgame. In their remembrances
of things past (Lake Como, an April afternoon, fits of
laughter, etc.), Nagg and Nell's present habitat (ash bins)
becomes a symbol of excrutiating irony; the "bottled" couple's
periodic appearances retain a purpose that would be of vast
importance to Zeami's drama:

The texts of No plays are often embellished with

odes and the diction of preceding ages with a

view to bringing up such memories and associations

of ideas as will remain etched on the minds of the

people. The characters dealt with are not so much

of the earth; they are very often supernatural

beings.
Whatever their roles, the characters of Noh (and Endgame)
"are distillations of powerful emotions--. . . the craving
for revenge [Hamm toward his father-'Accursed progenitorl'],13
unswerving loyalty [Clovz 'There's one thing I'll never
understand. Why I always obey you.'],14 or heartbreak over
disappointed love [Nellz 'Ah yesterday!']15--that transcend
the particular characters."

In structure Endgame parallels Zeami's conventions

just as closely as it does in stage techniques and character

portrayal, In a Noh performance, which consists of several

30

plays, there are three major parts: ie--introduction of a
specific theme by a couple of simple, easily understandable
dramas; he--development and elaboration of this theme in
three relatively intricate plays containing music, song,
and dance; and hyh--climax or finale of the performance in
two plays of rapid tempo and profound symbolic significance.
(These divisions are roughly analogous to the contrasting
rhythms of a sonata with its exposition, development, and
recapitulation.) In Beckett's play 12 is represented by
Clov's statement of the theme ("Finished . . .") and the
appearance of Hamm "who asserts himself as master, depicts
his solitude and misery, and restates the major theme of a

world drawing to its close."16

he is seen in the soured
vaudevillian spirit that dominates the major portion of
Endgame by quickening the tempo and intricately substanti-
ating the theme. The final, hyh, part of the Noh performance--
where the ehTTe performs a symbolic dance that brings the
program to an end--has its counterpart in Hamm's shouting,
whistling, and soliloquizing as he stands alone on the stage,
deserted by all: ". . . reckoning closed and story ended."
(P- 83)

A comparison between the structure and stage tech-
niques of Beckett's and Zeami's drama yields provocative
similarities, yet the most striking parallels are found in

their more abstract qualities. In Noh drama and Endgame the

audience is confronted with the shadows of life; they are

31

viewing the tattered, spectral remnants of humanity. To use

D. H. Lawrence's words, ". . . the cataclysm has happened,

17

we are among the ruins." It is important to realize, how-

ever, that in both dramas man's essential, tenacious spirit

picks its way over the rubble. Earle Ernst emphasizes that

If the entire past of the Noh play is reconstructed,
it frequently reveals all the conflict, struggle,
pain and bloodshed of the most agitated and lurid
melodrama. But none of this appears in the theatre.
The actual events are faded and distant; and the
essence of the experience of living remains.

Even the tragic world of Endgame, where the "death of the
stock props of Western civilization" is depicted, has its

eternal everpresent idiopathy:

Hamm: Go and see is she dead.

Clov: Looks like it.

Hamm: And Nagg? . . . What's he doing?
Clov: He's crying.

Hamm: Then he's living. (p. 62)

Hamm's speech

There I'll be, in the old shelter, alone against the
silence . . . the stillness . . . Then babble, babble
words, like the solitary child who turns himself into
children, two, three, so as to be together, and whis-
per together in the dark, moment upon moment, patter-
ing down, like the millet grains of . . . that Old
Greek. (pp. 69-70)

has its Japanese ancestor in Zeami's Semimaru; in this play
the main character is blind and crippled, just as Hamm is,

and in his last speech he also reflects on the dismaying

32

essence of life. Hamm's "children" become monkeys, the
"old shelter" a hut, the babble is transformed into "doleful

cries," and the "millet grains" into tears; yet the message

remains woefully similar:

My only visitors--how rarely they
come--

Are monkeys on the peak, swinging
in the trees;

Their doleful cries soak my sleeve
with tears.

I tune my lute to the sound of the
showers,

I pray for solace, but tears obscure
the sounds.

Even rain on the straw roof makes no
noise . . .

In this but I cannot even hear the
rain--

How painful to contemplate life in
this hut!

Beckett's and Zeami's main characters have been harshly
treated in childhood (Hamm, deserted by his father, is left
alone to cry in the dark; Semimaru--"An infant wrapped in
swaddling clothes/ His eyes have both been b1inded.")20;
the former's commands and the latter's tunes are no longer
heard by anyone. Beckett's characters, in dwelling upon the
past, are like the Buddhist ghosts who inhabit the Noh drama.
"They are tied to the wheel of life, unable to free them-
selves from a cycle that has become meaninglessly repeti-
tious."21

As can be seen, Endgame's similarities to Noh go
much deeper than a mere imitation of stage techniques.

Zeami's aesthetic theories incorporated the principles of

33

Zen and gave Noh a type of "quietude possible when the
agitations on the surface of actuality have reached an
equilibrium . . .emerging in an aura of timelessness."22
In Endgame, this basic premise of Buddhist thought may
possibly be seen as taking on a very literal appearance:
Clov spots a little boy sitting outside and, in that "gray,
gray" exterior, he appears to be the only living being.- To
be more precise, an image of the sitting Buddha emerges.
Martin Esslin comments on this solitary figure: "like the
Buddha the little boy contemplates his navel . . . that is,
he fixes his attention on the great emptiness of nirvana

Z3

nothingness." (This is Mr. Esslin's only reference to

the Orient in connection with Beckett.) Susumu Yamaguchi
explains this concept of contemplation that Beckett seems
to have imposed on this 'minor' character. Nirvana "sym-
bolizes the absolute serenity like the waveless ocean as

placid as a mirror, on the surface of which the visible

24

image of the whole universe is reflected." Clov's des-

cription of the ocean, that lies so near the little boy,

seems in perfect harmony with Yamaguchi's preceding metaphor:

Hamm: All is what?
Clov: What all is? In a word? Is that what
you want to know? Just a moment.

(he turns the telescope eh the without,
looks, lowers the telescope, turns
toward Hamm.)

Corpsed.

(Pause.)

Well? Content?

 

 

 

 

 

34

Hamm: Look at the ocean . . . The waves, how
are the waves?

Clov: The waves?
(he turns the telescope eh the waves.)
Lead. (PP. 29-30)

 

 

In Endgame, Buddha and Nirvana may be seen as replace-
ments for Occidental rationalism and allegiance to materialism;
ultimately, Hamm's desperate plea-~"Something . . . from your
heart . . . A few words . . . from your heart" (p. 80)--
cannot be answered in the Western intellectual, philosophical
context. "The autocratic restriction" states Edmond Holmes
in The Creed of Buddha, "of the spontaneous energies of

the soul by codes . . . by scriptures and churches, must

25

needs bear deadly fruit." This "deadly fruit" has poisoned

the world of Endgame where the plight of the madman painter
is a case in point:

Hamm: I used to go and see him, in the asylum.
I'd take him by the hand and drag him to
the window. Look! There! All that rising
corn! And there! Look! The sails of the
herring fleet! All that loveliness!
(Pause.)

He'd snatch his hand and go back into his
corner. Appalled. All he had seen was
ashes . . .

(Pause.)

It appears the case is . . . was not
so . . . so unusual.

(p. 44)

In his recent book, Samuel Beckett: His Mind and Art, Dr.
Supti Sen sees Beckett as clearly breaking with traditional
Western values: "Endgame seems to be Beckett's harshest

denouncement of the egotistic, material, and worldly existence

35

26

which keeps its eyes closed to spiritual depths." The

alternative lies in Eastern thought which believes that
"outward things are shadows, and all inward things, so far

as they hold aloof from the all-embracing consciousness are

27

dreams." Hamm's opening speech

bigger a man is the ler he is. (Pause. loomily.)
And the emptier. (He sniffs) Clov! (Pause.) No,
alone. (Pause.) WEEt dreams! Those forests!
(Pause.) Enough, it's time it ended . . . (pp. 2-3)

 

No, all is a--(he_ awns)--absolute, ( roudl ) the
ful

may readily be interpreted as Beckett's realization of the
emptiness that pervades a man lost in a forest of absurdi-
ties. Perhaps his "little boy" knows of a path out of the
forest.

Finally, it is important to understand why a drama
that appears so vastly different from the trends of Western
theatre could be helpful in better understanding Beckett's
theatre. To begin with, there is a poetic quality in Noh
which is also found in Endgame. This quality gives both
of them a very discernable sense of compression and concen-
tration. Clov has an understanding of this artistic reduc-
tion when he begins to clean up the stage:

Hamm: What are you doing?
Clov: Putting things in order . . . I'm going
to clear everything away!

Hamm: Order.
Clov: I love order. It's my dream. (p. 57)

36

In describing the Noh dramatists' similarities to Japanese
painters of the fourteenth century, Earle Ernst emphasizes
the role of creative 'ordering': "their process was . .

one of constant reduction, in which objects were depicted
with delicate selectivity and an austere economy of line."28
Clov's definition of his "dream"--"A world where all would
be silent and still and each thing in its last place" (p. 76)--
is in total keeping with a basic tenet of Noh: "The creation

of a tranquil, generally static mood."29

In Endgame, this

mood of quietude has its virtue:

Hamm: (wearily)

Quiet, quiet, you're keeping me awake.

(Pause.)

Talk softer . . . If I could sleep I

might make love . . . My eyes would

see . . . (p. 18)
In the midst of absurdities and in the light of life's
senselessness, Clov advances the following solution: "I
use the words you taught me. If they don't mean anything
anymore, teach me others. Or let me be silent." (p. 44)
When Nagg begins praying--"Our father which art--"--Hamm
quickly interrupts with-~"Silence! In silence!" (p. 55);
Hamm's retort is a command to Nagg to be quiet, but it also
suggests 'Our Father which art in silence!‘ The many pauses
that punctuate the dialogue of Endgame are as important as
the actual words. Beckett's affinity with Noh, which is

permeated with Buddhist teachings, may account for these

pauses. Holmes explains: "There is nothing in the history

37

of human thought more significant than the silence of Buddha
. . . [As Buddha saw clearly] life will have a stronger pur-
pose and a larger scope when silence is behind it than when

30 Ihab Hassan in

its motive force is a flux of words."
The Literature of Silence: Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett
states: "The silence composed of the words of Beckett is
more pure, and its relevance is universal . . . Beckett
understands that silence must be the ruling metaphor of the

"31 It

artist intent on discovering the form of chaos.
appears that Beckett could be viewed as a kindred spirit

of Noh. According to Ernst, the traditional Japanese theatre
contains "the reduction of the life of man to a single ful-
crum."32 "Beckett reduces; he never simplifies."33 His
dramatic "silences" (he describes his language as a "veil

which must be torn asunder in order to get at the things

lying behind")34 are best expressed in a type of drama that
can most artistically hold them. "It only means" says
Beckett, "that there will be a new form . . . To find a form

that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist

35 The fact that Beckett found this "new form" in

now."
Web is the point of this chapter.

Beckett's tragic vision of man in the twentieth
century can be focused through the use of an Oriental dramatic
mode established in the fourteenth century. Ihab Hassan

feels that Beckett "has gone to the root of nihilism in our

time, to the question of Being and Nothingness, of Death, .

38

and has imagined the ineluctable form of dissolution."36

In Noh plays the dead (in the form of the shite) come back
to earth and observe life from their very exclusive point of

view; Hamm sees the value of this method:

I wonder . . . Imagine if a rational being came
back to earth, wouldn't he be liable to get
ideas into his head if he observed us long
enough. (voice of rational bein ) Ah, good,
now I see what it is, yea, now understand
what they're at . . . (VehementTy) To think
perhaps it won't all have been for nothing!

(P- 33)

 

 

"The spiritual solace of Buddhism, as depiCted in Noh" explains
Faubion Bowers, "satisfied a dual need, that of relief from
temporal reality, and that of reassurance as to man's ulti-

mate salvation.”37

In Endgame, a glimmer of hope, perhaps
of possible salvation, gives Hamm pause in his desire for
complete severance from his ghastly, temporal existence:
"And yet I hesitate, I hesitate to . . . to end. Yes, there
it is, it's time it ended and yet I hesitate to--" (p. 3).
Perhaps salvation for Hamm lies with the Buddha-like "little
boy"--"a potential procreator." Such a possibility is not

so remote for, after all, Beckett found artistic salvation in

an Eastern dramatic form almost five hundred years old.

Although William Butler Yeats copied the Japanese
Noh conventions in his short plays, he never seemed, as
Samuel Beckett later did, to capture the spiritual essence

of the Orient. In comparing Yeats's The Cat and the Moon

 

39

(1926) with Beckett's Waiting For Godot one sees that the
latter artist's achievement with the Eastern theatrical form
is much more subtle since his understanding of Buddhist con-
cepts goes beyond mere dramaturgy. In his introduction to
Ernest Fenellosa's translations of Noh dramas in 1912, Ezra
Pound acknowledges Yeats's increasing interest in the Orient
and unwittingly foreshadows Samuel Beckett's attraction to
the Eastern dramatic mode:

Here was literature more relevant to contemporary

writing than the European tradition. As W. B.

Yeats put it, the writers who created the conven-

tions of No were "more like us even than Shake-

speare and Corneille. Their emotion was self-

conscious and reminiscent, always associating
itself with pictures and poems. 3

The similarities between The Cat and The Moon and

 

Waiting For Godot in setting, characterization and plot are

 

striking. The two beggars waiting for the saint in Yeats's
play appear almost as prototypes for Beckett's Vladimir and
Estragon. Both of these shoddy couples argue about the
objectives of their travels with wit and candor, and their
down-and-out states cannot keep them from discussing deeply
metaphysical questions with more than a trace of slapstick
humor. Yet like characters of Noh (exs: the ghosts of two
women searching the shore for the nobleman they once loved;
a grief crazed woman attempting to find her dead children;
ancient men hoping to find answers to insoluble riddles)

these Chaplinesque figures of Yeats's and Beckett's plays-

40

periodically realize the brokenness and emptiness of their
conditions. The former playwright's characters are blind and
lame, the latter's must scavenge for food and clothing as
well as sleep in ditches. For all their bickerings and
philosophic quarrels, however, there exists an almost sado-
masochistic relationship between each couple that is based

on mutual need and resembles the bond between Noh drama's

shite and waki. The blind beggar in The Cat and the Moon

 

needs the crippled one's knowledge and sight in order to
arrive at the saint's well; Vladimir and Estragon have been
together for years and often allude to the past--"We were

respectable in those days"39

--but now their partnership
resembles a sick marriage that is held together by a back-
log of shared experiences and fear of loneliness. In fact,

Noh's shite-waki character assignations take on vaudevillian

 

aspects in Yeats's and Beckett's tramps (a la Laurel and
Hardy)--the blind beggar and Vladimir making admirable shites.
In essence, the masks of the ancient Japanese theatre

are literally incorporated into The Cat and the Moon; Estragon

 

and Vladimir (in some productions their faces are completely
covered by heavy clown make-up) use their respective Laurel

and Hardy type caricatures to achieve a shite-waki effect.

 

Thus, they become analogous to the Noh ghosts making a
mysterious pilgrimage to contact some supernatural force.

Besides their modes of characterization, Waiting For

 

Godot and The Cat and the Moon also use Noh's minimal stage

 

41

sets. In the two dramas the sets are stripped down to bare
necessities. The omnipresent tree of the traditional Jap-
anese theatre is the only object that breaks the monotony

of Beckett's barren "country road" and Yeats's deserted
patch of no-man's land. Similarly, in Noh drama the ghosts,
demons, and possessed mortals are set against an other-
worldly backdrop that accentuates their all too mortal
predicaments; such characters play out their bitter love
affairs, violent deaths, transgressions and tragedies in a
stark setting that heightens the haunting power of their
spectral appearances. The grim plights of Yeats's and
Beckett's tramps as well as their alienation from society
and its trappings, is reflected in the "bare place[s]" in
which they seek salvation. That is, their inscrutable ideals
are as vague and enigmatic as their surroundings. In effect,
the mysterious quality of the Yeatsian saint Or Beckettian
Godot is symbolized in the stage sets.

Waiting For Godot and The Cat and the Moon are also

 

 

plays in which inaction is a motivating force. Structured
plot has been completely discarded in favor of Noh concepts
that value emotions over happenings and atmosphere over story.
The eternal questions of love, death, suffering and faith
cannot be contained, at least by Oriental standards, within
theatrical frameworks that reject supernatural causation.

It is clear that in these two modern dramas logical sequence

of events and actions is expelled since the blind faith and

42

mysterious longings of the tramps are beyond the conventional
beliefs of Western society. Quite frankly, the subject matters
of Noh plays are the distillations of human experiences to
the essentials; thus, the human fears of death, chaos, and
(especially in the twentieth century) meaninglessness are
projected on the stage without traditional techniques of
plot. In Western theatre such techniques belonged to genera-
tions that literally believed in predestination, the divine
will, and the guiding hand of some external, heavenly power.
The Buddhist philosophy behind Noh is quite removed
from Occidental respect for scientific causality. Whereas
the Christianized West believes in the chronological processes
of evolution and progress, the East is grounded in eternal
principles that unify past, present, and future. For an
Easterner a moment two thousand years ago appears no differ-
ent from the present one. The unpopular initial receptions

of Godot and Cat and the Moon unfortunately reveal that such

 

a perspective is beyond many a Westerner's experience. Critic
Alec Reid has mentioned that Beckett's plays are "based on
impact not argument, striving all the time to avoid defini-

"40 When such non-specific, plotless dramas were first

tion.
presented, audiences, brought up on more 'naturalistic',
'realistic' entertainment resorted to throwing vegetables
and insults. Harold Hobson, theatre critic for the Sunday
TThee recalls just such a reaction on the London opening

night of Godot (--a reaction not too different fromthat which

greeted Yeats's plays at the Abbey Theatre):

43

Certain lines in the play, such as "I have had
better entertainment elsewhere," provoked ironical
laughter; and when one of the characters yawned,
the yawn was repeated and amplified by a humorist
in the stalls. Here and there one could identify
sharp centers of disaffection, and now and again

a playgoer would get up and stomp out of the
theatre in anger and boredom.

Though Waiting For Godot and The Cat and the Moon

 

have such features as character portrayal, setting, and
anti-plot in common with Noh drama, it must also be pointed
out that Samuel Beckett and W. B Yeats incorporated Noh
quite differently when it comes to more abstract, philosophic
notions. Yeats's use of Noh theatrical conventions is anal-
ogous to the way the Impressionists used particular methods
of the Chinese block print. That is, Yeats and the painters
surrounding Monet did not penetrate to the heart of Eastern
thought with their superficial borrowings of Oriental decora-
tive elements. Beckett did.

As has been pointed out in the Introduction, William
Butler Yeats was brought up with Christian and Romantic
ideals that greatly influenced his work. Though he realized
the inconsistencies and fallabilities of traditional Western
thought, he found elements of Christianity to be essential
to his themes. Yeats himself admitted that the "Christian
cycle", as well as Noh, were "vehicles in which my moral as
well as nationalistic concerns as an Irishman could be most

42

effectively communicated." Samuel Beckett, though also

an Irishman, felt none of the idealistic, moral fervor that

44

was so important to Yeats. Although time and time again
Beckett will bring the Scriptures in Geeee,(Vladimir's many
references to the two thieves crucified with Christ; Lucky's
absurd theological speech in Act 1) his outlook, as will be
shown, is colored by Buddhist rather than Christian concepts.
By combining Christian and Occidental ideals with
Web conventions, Yeats found a dramatic "vehicle" but lost
much of Noh's uniquely Eastern spirit. To be specific, The

Cat and the Moon contains little of the aesthetic distance

 

and Buddhist inwardness of the ancient Japanese theatre;
essentially, it does not contain the poetic intensity or
timelessness that are integral to a Noh performance and which
Beckett seems to have captured. Whereas Yeats merely under-
stood the techniques of the Japanese theatre, Samuel Beckett
actually TeTe them and went beyond Noh dramaturgy into

elemental Eastern philosophy. In his notes to Cat and the

 

Moon, Yeats admits his limitations:

I have amused myself by imagining incidents and
metaphors that are related to certain beliefs of
mine as are the patterns upon a Persian carpet to
some ancient faith or philosophy . . . I generally
forget in contemplating my copy of an old Persian
carpet, for instance, that its winding and wander- 3
ing vine had once their own philosophical meaning.

Other specifics such as his failure to engage a suitably
poetic form and properly metaphysical (as opposed to religious)

theme in his Noh plays will be gone into later. Ultimately,

4S

Yeats established well-defined Oriental dramatic techniques
in his plays, but could never come to terms with the Zen-
Buddhist faith that should have accompanied them.

To repeat, in comparing Waiting_For Godot with The
Cat and the Moon many superficial traits of Noh drama may
be discerned in both, yet on a more fundamental, philosophic
level it is relatively clear that the aesthetic distance--
so necessary to Eastern art--is less prominent in the latter
play than in the former. Instead of zeroing in on a specific
religious objective at the end of £2923 (as Yeats does when
divine salvation restores his beggars to health), Beckett
illustrates the ancient Japanese dramatic notion of yhgeh
where the play's effectiveness is left to the audience's
imagination rather than summed up in a formal denouement.

At the conclusion of Cat and the Moon, the two beggars re-

 

enter a temporal reality in which they seek revenge for their
suffering and enjoy worldly delights. Such an ending is
indicative of an Occidental dramatic pattern rather than
Noh's Buddhist tenets. On the other hand, Vladimir and
Estragon's fate--i.e. being left in the same mysterious

state as in the beginning of the play--demonstrates the
ehTTefs overpowering Zen need of being done with earthly

life and entering a world beyond understanding and devoid

of "life's fitful fever." The incomprehensively mysterious

force of Godot is left intact.

46

Beckett's use of the Eastern theatrical mode also
differs from Yeats's in that the supernatural, eerie atmos-

phere that pervades Noh is never shed in Waiting For Godot,

 

not even at the conclusion. Though disgustingly sunk in

the lowest earthly condition--dressed in rags, sleeping in
ditches, living off rubbish--Beckett's characters feel as

out of place with reality at the end of the play as they

did in the beginning when Estragon was wrestling with his
shoe. Vladimir says: "Was I sleeping while the others
suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake or

think I do, what shall I say of today?" (p. 58) Similarly,
in his last message to the Boy for Godot, Vladimir's doubts
about his own existence are as strong as his doubts about

the Boy's memory: "You're sure you saw me, you won't come
and tell me tomorrow that you never saw me!” (p. 57) Yeats's
characters are much more sure of themselves, and consequently
lose much of their ghostly, spiritual dimension; they are
subjected to a Christian deus ex machina that places them
squarely within Western dramatic expectations and excludes
them from the spiritual dream world that comes out of Zen's
aesthetic distance.

As has been shown, the 'inwardness' of Buddhist
thought in Noh drama annuls the Western idea of dramatic
action and (paradoxically to Western eyes) aims at universal
truths. That is to say, the Noh character negates the world

and seeks, in his true Self or Being, the essence of existence

47

itself. In The Cat and the Moon Yeats fails to capture this

 

inherently subjective nature of Noh. In 1930 he wrote in

his diary:

I disliked the isolation of the work of art. I

wished, through the drama, through the comingling
of verse and dance, through singing that was also
speech, through what I called the applied arts of
literature, to plunge it back into social life.44

By using dance and song in The Cat and the Moon Yeats was

 

deliberately incorporating long valued Noh techniques, yet

his theme smacks more of altruistic Christian teachings than
Buddhist ideals. That is, he used Noh to convey Western
social and moral points rather than the Static Oversoul of
Eastern philosophy. For example, the ”poetic justice" of
Yeats's play satisfied the superficial, doctrinal objective

of Christian enlightenment (the faithful will be rewarded--
the Blind shall See), but it has little to do with universal
questions that refuse dogmatic, catechistic answers--questions
that are insoluable on a purely conscious level. For Beckett,

the insolubility of twentieth century man's problems of lone-

 

liness and isolation offers its own dramatic appeal. His
characters, in their constant efforts to communicate with
each other, realize that life remains a very puzzling exper-
ience with no easy answers. Instead of finding salvation

at the end of geeee, Vladimir and Estragon, like their Noh
ancestors, remain stationary in their dreamlike existence

with only the hope of some mysterious deliverance. Both

48

Beckett and the Buddhist realize that this enigmatic deliver-
ance must come from the depths of inner consciousness--true
Nirvana--rather than, as Yeats believed, external revelations.

In The Cat and the Moon the First Musician, like the saint,

 

is an outward expression of Christian teachings; in Waiting

For Godot any spiritual lessons are of a subconscious, Godot-

 

like nature that can only be found within the two tramps. On
this spiritual plane, Vladimir and Estragon are united with

a metaphysical, Eastern 'Oversoul' that can never be communi-
cated by gross actions, mere words, or a saint introduced

out of nowhere.

The Cat and the Moon and Waiting For Godot also expose

 

 

how two integral concepts of Noh theatre--time and poetry--
are handled by very differently inspired playwrights. In
Yeats's play the beggars come to a well looking for the
saint, proceed to argue, find the saint, argue again, and
finally go their separate ways. Time, in this case, is
explicit and taken for granted: a simple chronological
progression of rather strange events. The ambiguity of time
in geee£_is closer to the quasi-animate, quasi-inanimate
effect produced in the ancient Japanese theatre. Vladimir
and Estragon are like apparitions, appearing out of nowhere
and, unlike Yeats's couple, they cannot decide whether they
have reached their destination or not. (The two beggars in

The Cat . . . have been given definite instructions pertain-

 

ing to ”the appropriate place where the saint will arrive.")45

49

Beckett's characters, on the other hand, are not even sure
what day it is: "But what Saturday? And is it Saturday? Is
it not rather Sunday? Or Monday? . . .Or Friday? . . .I

may be mistaken.” (p. 59) In the second act Estragon cannot
recall the events of the first act; he will go only as far

as to say that the things Vladimir tells him are "possible.”
Such an obscure, indistinct state of affairs is practically
unknown to traditional Western theatre where progression of
time and action are of vital importance.

Perhaps the accomplishment that sets Samuel Beckett
most closely within the distinctive aura of Noh is his use
of poetry. William Butler Yeats's use of songs, chants, and
rhyme in his short plays is evocative of Noh's musical char-
acter, but it never penetrates to the heart of the drama
and thus remains a purely decorative device. Throughout The

Cat and the Moon, for example, Yeats intermittently scatters

 

various refrains, ditties, and even whole poems (exs. "The

"46

cat went here and there in the opening scene;

."47 at the con-

”Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
clusion), but Beckett sustains a poetic mood in all of

Waiting For Godot. Josephine Jacobsen says in The Testament

 

 

of Samuel Beckett that "the whole of Beckett's monstrous,

 

unified, circular time . . . is by genus a bitter, funny,
terrible poem."48 The "poetry of anti-poetry" in Godot

does not rest on the embellishment of dialogue, as employed

 

by Yeats, but rather on the actual musical flow of the

50

dialogue itself. he following quotation is exemplative of
a rhythm of point counterpoint, strophe anti-strOphe, silence

and sound found throughout the entire play:

Estragon: In the meantime let us try and converse
calmly, since we are incapable of keep-
ing silent.

Vladimir: You're right, we're inexhaustible.

Estragon: It's so we won't think.

Vladimir: We have that excuse.

Estragon: It's so we won't hear.

Vladimir: We have our reasons.

Estragon: All the dead voices.

Vladimir: They make a noise like wings.

Estragon: Like leaves.

Vladimir: Like sand.

Estragon: Like leaves.

(Silence)
Vladimir: They all speak together.
Estragon: Each one to itself.
(Silence)

Vladimir: Rather they whisper.

Estragon: They rustle.

Vladimir: They murmur.

Estragon: They rustle.

(Silence)

Vladimir: What do they say?

Estragon: They talk about their lives.

Vladimir: To have lived is not enough for them.

Estragon: They have to talk about it. (p. 40)

The actual contrasting of the above images becomes as subtly
musical as the ”leaves" and "dead voices" themselves. Ex-
planations and reasons become unnecessary with such lines since
they evoke indefinable feelings rather than specific thoughts.
The poetry of Noh drama is associative by nature and its
continuity is achieved not by logic but through harmonious

fluctuations such as those heard above. Beckett treats his

entire text as a musical composition in which each pause,.

Sl

silence, and interruption is geared toward the unification
of dramatic impact. In other words, Beckett's plays are

poetic because of a basic integration of diction, whereas

 

Yeats tacked on musical lines that at times seem inappro-
priate or even jarring. The beauty, sensuality and
melodiousness of Web drama's "aristocratic" poetry is a far
cry from the "hesitating rhythm" that Yeats found in his
attempts at poetic drama.

To sum up, William Butler Yeats colored his dramatic
structure and Christian beliefs with Noh theatrical tech-
niques but failed to enter into the philosophic Buddhist
heart of Zeami's aesthetic. Yeats's far from meagre poetic
skills were capable of creating a grammar and style reminis-
cent of Noh dramaturgy, but he placed primacy on speech and
physical accessories, ignoring the soul of the tradition's
metaphysics. Unlike the typical Japanese Noh play which
must be performed in order to display any kind of intelli-
gibility and feeling, Yeats's short "dance" dramas can be
appreciated just as much by a skillful reading as by an
actual production. (It is interesting to note that the
Japanese have nothing comparable to the West's closet drama.)
Contrarily, the music of Beckett's language, immediacy of
his vaudevillian routines and importance of the unified
effect of lighting, scenery, and costume make such plays as

Waiting:For Godot truly theatrical experiences. In his

 

52

introductory book on Noh theatre, Yasuro Nakamura urges that
"the way to really appreciate Noh is to see with the eyes

49 This insight is in keeping with

and feel with the heart."
the Oriental belief that 'true art should not be understood
but experienced.' According to critic Alec Reid, the same
artistic criterion should also be applied to the Absurd

drama of Beckett:

At a play by Beckett we hear words but they are
only part of something bigger, and so our re-
sponse, which is to the whole experience, is
predominantly direct and sensuous, not indirect
and analytical.

As an Absurdist playwright, Samuel Beckett's deep
understanding of the Eastern philosophy behind Noh drama
leads one to suspect that ancient Oriental theatre shares
similar characteristics and values with the contemporary
state of modern theatre. At an East-West drama symposium
Eugene Ionesco commented that "Japan's Noh is the avant-

garde theatre of the present,"51

and many of his fellow
artists agreed that Web contains certain elemental qualities
that Western theatre has lost and sorely needs. To be more
precise, just as Imagism brought haiku and the world of the
Orient into poetry, the Theatre of the Absurd indicates the
emergence of certain Zen Buddhist principles into Occidental
drama. Playwrights such as Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco,

and Jean Genet expose modern Western man's vulgar materialism,

apathy, and distressing loneliness with a type of drama that

53

breaks all the conventions of traditional theatre. In short,
they seek new ways and means of conveying their atypical
(in the Western perspective) insights. The playwrights of
the Absurd feel that a personal God with "white beard" must
be abandoned in order to come to terms with man's existence
and Self in the modern apocalyptic age. The senselessness
of the human condition and the inadequacy of rationalism and
discursive thought are problems that have finally been exposed
by fairly recent developments in Western drama. It must be
realized, however, that the Eastern.inf1uence--so crucial to
Yeats, Pound, and T. S. Eliot--has been of considerable
importance in the ways in which this exposure is presented.
By better understanding Beckett's plays in terms of the
Theatre of the Absurd and Noh drama, a surer appreciation
of the Western life style itself is inevitable.

Noh plays are intended to suggest "unspoken, inde-

finable realities"52

that for their inexplicability are
nonetheless genuine to the human experience. Endgame (with

its "gray light," "barren earth") and Waitithor Godot

 

(set in the midst of "a ravaged . . . bloated landscape . . .
permeated with pointlessness")53 are two dramas in which
reality has been, in the Absurdist tradition, magnified to
unbelievably grotesque proportions so that the enigma of
existence is explored. In Yukio Mishima's modern translation
of the Noh play Kantan, the physician (sage) tells the ehTEe

Jiro:

54

You've never once tried to live . . . you've been

dying while you're still alive . . . Is there no

way to make a madman like you understand the futi-

lity of human existence?54
This "futility" is at the root of the Theatre of the Absurd
where man finds that he is a pawn in an incomprehensible,
universal chess game. (Many critics have literally viewed
Endgame in just such a light.)55 The nightmarish quality
of this realization is exposed in Kantan when Jiro enters
a mysterious, magical dream world. The Absurd playwrights
also rely on the surrealistic images of dreams to expose
the fact that real and unreal, true and false are indistinct
in a world where man no longer believes in his place at the

center of the universe. Vladimir, the 'shite' of Waiting

For Godot, feels that "some one, somewhere" is probably

 

looking down on him and saying-~"He is sleeping, he knows
nothing, let him sleep on" (p. 58)--and, 'absurdly' enough,
Clov finds that "the words that remain--sleeping, waking

. have nothing to say." (p. 81) Their stage is identical
to that of Noh where past and present, life and death merge
into a void: ”visions become actual, and actuality turns

56 In such a dreamlike context, the traditional

to dreams."
values of Western drama, i.e. time and place, become mean-
ingless. Whether this meaninglessness is in fact an accurate
description of modern life might be disputed by theologians,

but it is undoubtedly true that the Absurd dramatists view

it in such a manner. Their questions and fears are shared

55

in the Noh dramas even though the latter plays were written
centuries earlier. In the following pages of this chapter,
certain undeniable parallels between Samuel Beckett's short
dramas of the Absurd and Noh will be identified.

There is a self-consciousness in both Noh drama and
the Theatre of the Absurd that constantly reflects on the
universal predicament of mankind. Of course, this has been
the thematic territory of drama throughout the ages, but
in these two specific types of theatre the symbolic content
reaches into incredibly powerful archetypal and apocalyptic

recesses. In Waiting For Godot, for example, the symbolic

 

mode of Noh where every movement and gesture conveys signi-
ficance, and the all encompassing senselessness held aloft

by the Absurdists are inextricably twined.\ Vladimir is
poignantly aware of his role: "But at this place, at this
moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or
not." (p. 51) The stage on which Vladimir or the ehT£e_
stands becomes his very state of mind; and their minds are
prototypes of Everyman's most innate feelings when confronted
with the abyss of modern existence. The womb is their
starting point and they always come back to it. In Kantan

Jiro utters the following lines:

A baby is born. Into this dark, gloomy world. His
mother's womb was more cheerful. Why should he ever
have wanted to leave it for a gloomier place? Little
idiot. I can't understand him at all.5

56

Such thoughts weigh heavily on the minds of the tragic heroes
and ghosts of Noh and are shared by the protagonists of the
Theatre of the Absurd. It has been said that Beckett's
characters prefer the shelter of the womb to the sterility,
ashes, and hell that threaten to engulf them (if it hasn't
already). Though Beckett once told Peggy Guggenheim that

he had always been haunted by "a terrible memory of life in
his mother's womb,"58 his plays and novels show that pre-
natal life is a state to be desired. In Beckett's play he;
Without Words (1958), the ”player" tumbles onto the stage

and repeatedly struggles to return to the wings, illustrating
the Absurdist and Noh view that birth is a forcible ejection
from security into an extremely threatening (both physically
and emotionally) environment.

Just as time in a dream loses all value and becomes
muddled with spectres from the past and visions of the
future, Noh drama and the Theatre of the Absurd are beyond
the laws of chronology and conventional reality. Thus, it
is little wonder that the dark, mysterious realm of death
should play such a vital part in them both. The ultimate
eventuality that pursues man throughout his life is reflected
in these dramas with images of incredible intensity. Donald

Keene, in his introduction to Yukio Mishima's Five Modern

 

No Plays, explains that "the world of the dead was perhaps

uniquely suited to the peculiarly remote, symbolic nature

59

of No." Differing from Waiting For Godot and Endgame,

 

57

Samuel Beckett's most recent dramas are literal postmortem
reflections by the characters themselves. These characters--
evolved from such people as Vladimir and Hamm--accept their
niche in purgatory and incessantly ponder the activities

and emotions of their previous temporal selves. The three
dead characters in BTey (1963) are a case in point. Buried
in urns up to their necks throughout the drama, they talk
about the adulterous triangle in which they had all once
participated. According to stage directions, their "faces
[are] so lost to age and aspect as to seem almost part of

the urns."60

(Unlike Nagg and Nell in Endgame, these vague
personages are not peripheral to the main stream of the
play but are central to it.) Such specific directions evoke
the strangely masked faces of Noh as well as illustrate the
Absurdist tradition of making the characters as anonymous,
stereotyped, and deathlike as possible. (Other examples

of this convention are the two couples-~Smith and Jones in

Ionesco's The Bald Soprano and Mommy and Daddy in Albee's

 

The American Dream.) Death, for the Noh and Absurdist

 

playwrights, represents the closest thing to eternity that
man is capable of obtaining.

As the spotlight focuses successively on the husband,
wife, and mistress of gTey, their toneless voices and spec-
tral aspects are reminiscent of the creatures who inhabit

Dante's Purgatorio and Zeami's dramas. Their loves and woes

 

are uniquely distanced by the state in which the audience.

58

finds them and, consequently, their feelings and thoughts

are reduced to a series of banalities. This deliberate
aesthetic distancing gives the audience a viewpoint from
which to separate the truly profound aspects of life from
trite, dime-novel sentiments. In brief, the passions of

the characters in gTey have nothing whatsoever to do with
love or soul. With sledge hammer repetition these three
people make their accusations and voice their tribulations,
while their petty selfishness is uncompromisingly magnified.-
The threesome's insignificant appearance, stereotyped lines,
and soap opera emotions convey the Absurd playwright's belief
in the unfortunate divorce between man and his true place

in the cosmos. In other words, man's selfishness has little
to do with his §eTT. Noh characters, like those in ETey,

are also deathly shadows of what they were in life and
distillations of temporal emotions. When one of the urn-
like personages in ETey exclaims "There is no sense in

this . . . none whatsoever" (p. 25), she sums up the Absurdist
position as well as that of the Noh character who is forced
to relive his or her life. Although commenting on the effect
of Noh, Japanese scholar Earle Ernst unwittingly clarifies

the Absurdist principles behind Beckett's Play:

These dramatic images of being pulse in rhythmic

alternation. Sorrow is summoned up from the past,
reflected upon, becomes timeless entity. Man, the
fool, acts out his inherent absurdities.61

59

At this point it would be beneficial to compare
another of Beckett's famous stage plays with a particular Noh
drama in order to clearly illustrate the previously discussed

concepts. Krapp's Last Tape (1958) shows the final disinte-

 

gration of man in an Absurd world and runs parallel, struc-
turally and thematically, to Zeami's fourteenth century
drama Kagekiyo. Both plays deal with the meaninglessness
of life and love besides showing the final absurdities that
existence has to offer, i.e., the sorrowful regrets of old

62--lives

age. Kagekiyo--"defeated, old, blind and destitute"
like a hermit in his hovel, chanting the lays of dead warriors
and his own exploits to the accompaniment of his lute. On
this slender thread of plot the traditional Noh form of

sustained reminiscence comes into being. The story line of

Krapp's Last Tape_is just as slight. A nearsighted, almost

 

deaf old man-~"white face, purple nose and unshaven" (p. 2)63

--is found alone on stage, listening to tapes he made at
various intervals during his youth and adulthood. In listen-
ing to his own voice repeat the follies of love and the
heartbreak of failure, Krapp, like the ehTee kagekiyo,
becomes 'living' proof of life's absurd rewards for vanity
and pride.

It must be remembered that on a physical level as
well as a thematic one, these two plays are quite similar.
Krapp's pratfalls and slapstick fumbles as he walks about

listening to the recorder are gross exaggerations of the

60

Noh character's subtle movements as he recounts the story
of his previous life. The ehThe's death dance at the end
of each Noh drama seems to be parodied in Krapp's grotesque
ballet of bends, falls, and bizarre stances while listening
to the concluding spools.

To be sure, the thoughts and emotions revealed in
the characters' actual lines are identical. For instance,
the ridiculous incongruity between what Krapp and Kagekiyo
see themselves as and what the audience is shown gives an

absurd quality to both plays. Krapp states at the end:

Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a

chance of happiness. But I wouldn't want them

back. NOT WITH THE FIRE IN ME NOW. (p. 27)
The striking contrast of these defiant words with the pathetic,
clownish man standing on stage is definitely part of the
ironic tone striven for in the Theatre of the Absurd. As
Krapp utters his last fearless words the stage directions take
on added significance--"KRAPP MOTIONLESS STARING BEFORE HIM
THE TAPE RUNS ON IN SILENCE." (p. 28) Kagekiyo's closing

lines connote Krapp's unenviable predicament as he stands

frozen before us:

I have lived here for years . . . How many years?
I cannot tell . . . I am blind, but when the
breeze blows, I know that autumn comes. . . No
one has a place to rest, except in his own mind.
All is vanity: all human beings, too. No one
can tell me where I may rest.6

61

AcCording to the Zen philosophy which underlies Noh, worldly
comforts and temporal delights are empty. The true happiness
of Self cannot be discovered in earthly existence. Such
beliefs are deeply felt by poor Krapp; his following words
were spoken during the act of love: "I said again I thought
it was hopeless and no good going on, and she agreed, without
opening her eyes.” (p. 27) On his sixty-ninth birthday

Krapp begins to realize that his life has been a prison of
false hopes and lost causes. Kagekiyo comes to the same
tragic conclusion.

Noh and the Theatre of the Absurd cannot escape the
truths of the human condition. That is, the shites or main
characters of both modes represent mankind's feeble and hope-
less attempts to make order out of chaos and significance out
of meaninglessness. Their failures are the source of Zeami's
and Beckett's dramatic art. In Waiting For Godot Vladimir's
following words are appropriate to the view taken by the Noh
and Absurd playwrights--a view essentially Eastern and only

recently communicated in Western drama:

All I know is that the hours are long, under these
conditions . . . We wait. We are bored . . . In
an instant all will vanish and we'll be alone once
more, in the midst of nothingness. (p. 58)

The Noh plays spoken of in this chapter were written
and performed for the aristocratic classes of Japan. Such

a society demanded thought as well as entertainment from

62

their favored artists. Thus, it is not surprising to find

a deeply moving metaphysical element in Zeami's and his
followers' plays. They were meant to stimulate the minds

of a noble class that had been freed from the worries of
practical, material survival. Zen Buddhist teachings became
deeply engrained in Noh and affected its stress on the con-
sciousness of Self rather than mere temporality.

At the beginning of the twentieth century a similar
evolution of art began to take place in the West. The
Industrial Revolution had created conveniences that changed
life on the physical plane, yet the non-material, spiritual
world was all but ignored by Victorian hypocrisy, morality,
and materialism. Fortunately, the art of Yeats, Pound,

T. S. Eliot and Beckett, like that of Zeami, created an
artistic milieu that was aware of spiritual insights coming
from the East. These writers found that the mind and soul
held as many wonders as the automobile, airplane and all the
gadgets being turned out by industry to make life easier.
Poets and playwrights, whose predecessors had drowned them-
selves in Nature, found that their natural surroundings had
been spoiled by economic production and, consequently, turned
to mental territory that Freudian psychology had just begun
to unearth. Like the fourteenth century patrons of Zeami,
twentieth century artists desired subjects that were relevant
to their new way of life and extreme aesthetic self-conscious-

ness.

63

The suffering of the Noh ghost as it wrestles with
the inherently unsolvable questions of life (why must love
include pain? Why does man delude himself with temporal
happiness? Can loneliness ever be mitigated?) are also
shared by Vladimir and Estragon, Hamm and Clov. Such char-
acters differ from those created in traditional Western
drama, in that they have become 'ghosts' or 'shades' whose
very stage existence connotes a realm beyond the purely
physical--a realm integrally related to the spiritual side
of man and diametrically opposed to Cartesean objectivity.
The host of Beckettian stage characters have come to repre-
sent man's almost supernatural need to find Nirvanic unity
with his fellow man and him§eTT. The darkness that surrounds

Krapp, the barren landscape of Waiting For Godot, and Hamm's

 

skull room accentuate the solitary confinement of modern
man without the unifying power of a cosmic soul. Their
motivating drive to escape desolation through suicide, rage,
memories, or Godot is never realized, yet their incessant
need to enter a spiritual state nonetheless remains constant.
Noh drama and the Theatre of the Absurd capture the
essence of man's spiritual consciousness. The Web and
Absurdist playwrights realize, as the priest does in the

Noh play Sotoba Komachi, that "In a dream lull our lives are
65

 

passed; all, all/ That round us lies/ Is visionary, void."

CHAPTER III

NIRVANA AND SAMSURA IN THE NOVELS

Samuel Beckett's novels have never been as widely
appreciated as his plays, but their profound sensitivity to
modern man's condition and unique stylistic attributes make
them landmarks in twentieth century literature. Though most
of the novels were written before the plays, it is interest-
ing to note that Eastern philosophy also played an intrinsic
part in their make up. The mysterious, Nirvanic unity sought
by Vladimir and Estragon is a natural extension of the al-
most Zen Buddhist goals cherished by Murphy, Watt, Molloy,
and the Unnamable in their respective novels. Of course, the
technical and structural elements of Noh drama cannot be.
applied to the prose works, but it is nonetheless discernable
that beliefs central to Buddhism apply as integrally to the
novels as they do to the plays.

In the first part of this chapter the Buddhist con-
cepts of Samsura and Nirvana will be defined and related

to the trilogy--Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable--

 

 

 

written between 1945 and 1950. Once these key Eastern

concepts have been explained, an intensive look at one novel

 

(Malone Dies) will reveal Beckett's awareness of other basic

64

 

[II (Ii 5‘ ll i A.

65

Oriental convictions pertaining to love, carnal desire, and
temporal suffering. In the last part of the chapter the
earlier and less successful novels--Murphy (before 1938)
and E233 (1942-1944)--along with the highly enigmatic EEK.
.lE_L§ (1959) will be used to illustrate how compatible the
genre of the anti-novel is with Eastern aesthetics.

By way of introduction it should be established that
all of Samuel Beckett's novels more or less abandon tradi-
tional literary aesthetic values held in the West. Beckett's
prose has evolved into a form so different from the estab-
lished modes and the expectations of readers that their
publication in any large number was delayed until after the

stunning controversy and success of Waiting_For Godot in

 

1953. Like Buddhism, the novels contain no message; they
are, however, carefully constructed works whose importance
lies in the multitude of associations and ideas they produce.
Beckett makes it clear that the lives of such characters as
Murphy, Watt and Malone are purposeless and absurd. Because
of their unusually sensitive emotional and spiritual natures,
they see through modern technological society's complexities
and problems revealing the discrepancy between man and his
true place in the cosmos. Above all, Beckett's Chaplinesque
figures seek means of escaping society's meaningless conven-
tions (exs. Murphy's spells in his rocking chair; Watt's

aimless travelling; Malone's writing) in order to find their

66

particular 'Godots." In other words, they hope to find a
more viable and mystical way of relating to the cosmos. As
will be shown, the way in which these characters think and
act are fundamentally different from characters operating
under Western ideals of success, happiness, and progress.
By Occidental standards these bungling misfits would be
classified as insane failures, yet in an Oriental perspec-
tive they may be seen as entering a state in which body and
mind are at one with the universe. It should be added that
their spiritual goals have a definite Buddhist tinge.
Before defining the methaphysical ambitions of the
characters in Samuel Beckett's novels, it would be helpful
to quickly view the literary environment in which they were
formed. Just as Yeats and Pound broke with traditional
Western concepts of drama, writers such as Franz Kafka, Jean-
Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Alain Robbe-Grillet realized
that the novel was in need of a new aesthetic in order to
survive and deal effectively with the apocalyptic temper of
modern man. After World War I the Dadaists and Surrealists
took new cognizance of what was considered creative or
artistic. The Id as well as the Urinal found their way
into the works of Salvador Dali and Marcel Duchamp. Cyni-
cism became the artist's calling card and the dark recesses

of the mind the new frontier of creating. Kafka's The Trial

 

and The Castle defined modern man in his new age--a stranger

 

unable to comprehend the "grotesque unconnections between

67

the human being and the transcendental."1

Paradox, illogic,
and demonic irony heralded a new era of literature. Albert

Camus, in explaining K's predicament in The Trial, shed

 

light on the way most artists in the 20's and 30's viewed

the terrain of their creations:

In a universe that is suddenly deprived of illusions

and of light, man feels a stranger. His is an irre-

mediable exile, because he is deprived of memories

of a lost homeland as much as he lacks the hope of a

promised land to come. This divorce between man and

his life, the actor and his setting, truly constitutes

the feeling of absurdity.
With the new and uncanny "feeling," writers such as Sartre,
Robbe-Grillet, and Nathalie Saurraut discarded idealistic
terms in describing human existence and concentrated on
subjective aspects of anxiety, dread, and guilt. Existen-
tialism, with its Zen connotations, took hold of French
artists and intellectuals in the years before and directly
after World War II. In the early 40's, Samuel Beckett,
after spending a decade travelling and living on the con-
tinent, went into hiding from the Gestapo for his Resistance
activities. In the French countryside he lived as a peasant
writing Watt. As will be shown in the following pages of
this chapter, the Eastern associations of these works cer-
tainly spring from the absurdity that placed him in such

an ironic situation. Western rationality has little value

in war time.

68

The absurdity of life communicated by Kafka as well
as the existential doctrines of a multitude of French writers
play a major part in Beckett's novels. The realization that
there is no set meaning to existence leaves the individual
free to think and act on a plane defined by Self instead of
ideals. For Beckett, a free consciousness plays havoc with
traditional philosophic and moral boundaries. Such subjective
concepts are in harmony with Oriental beliefs. Buddhism, for
instance, denies that the present, mortal life is absolute
and furthermore understands that it is the supreme absurdity
to put faith in one's mere physical being. The new breed
of writers after the First World War were geared toward
responsible self-expression free from obligations toward
out-worn ideologies. It is little wonder that their newfound
isolation and subjectivity would harness Eastern thought.

The Dadaists used such Buddhist phrases as "interior dis-
tance," "inner space," and "pure vacancy"3 to describe what
they were up to. They pointed out the ridiculousness of
twentieth century man's materialism by contrasting it to
artistic works created out of "act of consciousness stemming
from inner stillness."4 Surrealism has its own share of
occult associations along with its mysteriously dream-like
images. Manifestoes published by Surrealist artists--headed
by Dali--referred to outlooks that were Buddhist in origin.

Critic Ihab Hassan feels that La Revolution Surrealiste (a

 

. .\. Ii...ll'.l\u|..[l’|.[ ‘l‘( [l1‘l.lll‘ II

69

tract contributed to by avant garde artists in the thirties)
"turns toward the East for inspiration."5
Beckett and his contemporaries arrived at a point
where freedom from Western ideas was not only at the core of
art but also at the heart of any valid experience. Exis-
tence, whether in Kafka's, Sartre's, Beckett's, or Buddha's
interpretations, is a bubble with nothing at its center.
All of these men put true freedom of consciousness at the
basis of any belief or philosophy. They show a concern with
the individual's place in the universe and reveal that exis-
tence must be faced in terms of the Self. The cataclysmic
religious and metaphysical void of man in the twentieth cen-

tury apocalypse has been filled, in part, by a turning toward

Eastern philosophy.

When Arthur Waley published The No Plays of Japan

 

in 1920, he stressed that two Buddhist ideas must be kept in
mind if one is to properly appreciate ancient Japanese drama:
Samsura and Nirvana. The same holds true in approaching

Samuel Beckett's trilogy--Iolloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnam-

 

ehTe. These Oriental concepts make what otherwise might

be thought of as negative, unorderly works into a unified
literary accomplishment. With an Eastern perspective one
can see in the three separate books a progression from an
absurd state of physical being to a spiritual state that has

definite Buddhist overtones.

70

The idea of Samsura, or the cycle of repeated rebirths,
is a basic premise of Oriental religion. The Buddhist believes
that his present existence is the result of previous deeds in
other lives; his life is just one link in an endless chain of
rebirths. It must be explained that in Buddhism spiritual
energy does not die with the body but takes on other shapes
and forms. This energy can benefit the physical being if it
is used, not in selfishness but in propagation of the Self's
transcendence into universal proportions--or Nirvana. With
such a theory the separate characters of the trilogy--Molloy,
Moran, Malone, Saposcat, Macmann, and the Unnamable-~can be
interpreted as the manifestations of a spiritual energy that
seeks a state of oneness with the cosmos. The Unnamable comes
closer to this state than the others for he has lost the "I"
or "ego" responsible for man's unfortunate treadmill existence
in Samsura.

From the very beginning of Malone Dies, one hears

 

echoes from the past and feels that Malone, the writer-prota-

gonist, has had previous incarnations:

Something must have changed . . . What matter whether

I was born or not, have lived or not, am dead or merely
dying . . . I see us again as we are, namely to be
removed grain by grain until the hand, wearied, begins
to play, scooping us up and letting us trickle back
into the same place . . . There are moments when I

feel I have been here always . . . Then . . . that I
have come back after a long absense . . . For I must
have lived, once, out there, and there is no recover-
ing from that.

71

Along with his feeling of having once existed in some other
time and place, Malone literally finds things that have
appeared in Molloy (and even previous novels). These incon-
grous objects are comfortably familiar to any reader of

Samuel Beckett's literary cosmogony: the weathered hat, piece
of string, gnarled walking stick, sucking stones (a la Demos-
thenes), crutch, and bicycle bell. Besides inanimate objects,
the names of particular characters from prior novels turn up
with surprising regularity. Murphy and Watt as well as Mr.
Quin from the unfinished novel Mercier and Camier are briefly
mentioned and then dropped. Most importantly, Malone remem-
bers many specific episodes from the adventures of Moran and
Molloy in the first part of the trilogy. Malone identifies
completely with these former characters. For example, he
(like them) must have arrived where he is "in an ambulance
perhaps, a vehicle of some kind certainly." (p. 181) These
are familiar words indeed! And even though there is no

incident in Malone Dies where the hero is mugged, he does

 

remember Molloy's scuffle--"How great is my debt to sticks

. . . so great that I almost forget the blows they have trans-
ferred to me." (p. 183) What is more, the conclusion of
Molloy is reflected upon by Malone as though it has actually
been part of his own saga: "perhaps I expired in the forest

. . . yes now that I speak of a forest I vaguely remember a
forest." (p. 183) In effect, the detective tale of Molloy

and Moran has become part of Malone's written rememberances.

72

Just as the sleuth Moran disintegrates into the crippled Molloy
in the first part of the trilogy, Malone is an extension of
Molloy--taken out of the ditch when he expired and placed in
the little institution type room where, paralyzed, he writes
in bed. (A bit later in this chapter, Malone's assumption
into the Unnamable will be analyzed from a more literary or .
stylistic standpoint--i.e., the pronoun "I" being used in
different ways in the second and third parts of the tril-
08V—)

Although Malone seems to be the reincarnation of pre-
vious characters, he is, paradoxically, his own individual
Self. That is, he implies that the former protagonists'
existences, though in the past, are dependent on his own. A
comparison with Buddhism makes this paradox more understand-
able. Dr. Walpola Rahula in What The Buddha Taeghe might
just as well be explaining the trilogy's scheme of literary
rebirth as he metaphorically expounds on the essence of

Samsura:

A child grows up to be a man of sixty. Certainly the
man of sixty is not the same as the child sixty years
ago, nor is he another person. Similarly, a person
who dies here and is reborn elsewhere is neither the
same person, nor another. The difference between
death and birth is only a thought moment; the last
thought moment in the socalled next life, w ich, in
fact, is the continuity of the same series.

Malone succinctly sums up this "thought moment" process of

Samsura when he says:

73

I shall never get born and therefore never get dead.
No matter, I have just had another little private
idea. Perhaps it is the same one back again, ideas
are so alike, when you get to know them. (p. 183)

The conception of a cycle of rebirths or reincarna-
tions is the result of a typically Eastern philosophic-reli-
gious premise. Unlike the Westerner with his Freudian out-
look, a Buddhist finds little satisfaction in a permanent,
substantial ego. For him, life (if lived to it fullest) is
an interplay of unanalyzable forces of mind, matter, and
spirit. The Easterner sees conscious reality as an enig-
matic, undefined state fusing particular physical and mental
energies with universal ones; he finds it absurd to believe
that one's personal life can be divorced from the spirit and
the cosmos. Occidental man's uncompromisingly selfish belief
in spiritual realms makes it possible for him to unite with
forces beyond logical and rational comprehension. For Buddha
and Beckett, man's downfall lies in the fact that he cannot
accept the reality of his Soul. Malone sees this "soul [as
being] denied in vein . . . vigilant, anxious, turning in
its cage as in a lantern, in the night without haven or craft
or matter or understanding." (p. 282) The Buddhist's soul
or Self, through Nirvana, is in a much better condition.

Nirvana is a mystical state in which man's cycle of
rebirths is stopped and he enters perfect union with the
cosmos. Therefore, "Emphasis should fall not on the image

of the 'drop of water which merges with the ocean,’ but

74

rather on 'the ocean which enters into the drop."'8 In

Nirvana false individuality disappears along with desire for
temporal happiness and attraction to worldly objects. In
other words, the mortal passions are cooled. With the acqui-
sition of such understanding there can be no boundaries be-
tween where the individual ends and the cosmos begins. Eter-
nity is found in the moment of being at One with the universe.
In Samuel Beckett's trilogy the various characters
seek such a state. Through his writing, Malone tries to
extricate himself from the "I" of his pseudo-self or ego;
thus Sapo and Macmann come into being. Malone does not
merely want to die, he wants to end a long cycle of rebirths.
It is not until the appearance of the Unnamable, however,
that the Void-Self of Nirvana is finally obtained. In many
ways like a Buddhist monk, Malone sees the 'light' of uni-
versal juncture and prepares to leave egoistic identity
behind. Once he realizes, at the end of the novel, that he
can have no hypostatic 'I'--"That is the end of me. I shall
say no more" (p. 287)--and abandons Macmann to a "tangle of
gray bodies" (p. 287), he conforms to Buddhist Nirvanic
salvation. Malone no longer cares about his string, walking
stick, bicycle bell, etc., and is delivered of covetousness;
he subsequently transmigrates into a new type of life. In
Malone's last words--"he will never/ never anything/ there/

any more" (p. 288)--and the aporia of the Unnamable's initial

75

round of questions--"Where now? Who now? When now?" (p.
291)--the disintegration of ego is concluded.

Examining the structure of the novels, one finds
that positive and negative (whether in the characters' value
judgments, random comments, or dialogue) have a tendency to
cancel one another out and leave a void. This void in which
the Unnamable exists has an Eastern connotation. The Unnam-
able's absence of body or will comes down to what may be
called a dynamic Negative or Plenum-Void that is in tune with
existence beyond materialism or rationalism.

The following lines from Malone Dies are quite

 

evocative in light of Samsura and Nirvana:

Now that I have looked I hear the wind. I close
my eyes and it mingles with my breath, words and
images run riot in my head, pursuing, flying,
clashing, merging endlessly. But beyond this
tumult there is a great calm, and a great indif-
ference, never really to be troubled by anything
again. (p. 224)

These "words and images" are analogous to the endless cycle
of rebirths--Samsura--to which man is fated if he does not

find the "great calm" of Nirvana. Throughout Holley, Malone

 

Dies and The Unnamable the contradiCtions between the temporal

 

and spiritual are exposed and one feels, along with the
characters, that the peace of Eastern Nirvana is preferable
to the "tumult" of Western selfishness. The incompatibility
of the two is not only thematic, but also worked out within

the trilogy's stylistic and structural framework. As the '

76

trilogy progresses the egoistic self is peeled off with sur-
gical precision.

Molloy's superficial, detective story plot gives
way, ultimately, to the absolute plotlessness of The Unnamable.
Beckett relates the metamorphosis from Western to Eastern con- r
sciousness by the styles of each of his narrators. That is,
the frequency and meaning of the pronoun "I" does not remain

constant throughout the trilogy. The literal occurrence of

 

"I" in Molloy is striking from the very opening paragraph:

I am in my mother's room. It's I who live there
now. I don't know how I got there . . . I was
helped. I'd never have got there alone. (p. 7)
Molloy and Moran are psychologically obsessed with their own

lives, adventures, and feelings to the total disregard of

larger metaphysical principles. In Malone Dies, the narrator

 

loses his egoism and incorporates the veneer of a writer.
With the Unnamable "I'ness" both literally and figuratively
becomes blurred to the point of nonexistence, and his deep
metaphysical contemplations border on mystical revelation.
The reader, in the last part of the trilogy, enters a state
of shapelessness in which it becomes impossible to discern
the objective from subjective. It is difficult to comprehend
the Unnamable's physical appearance, let alone the exact
nature of his philosophic monologues, and much of the time
his words refer to nothing but themselves, thus becoming cir-

cular digressions on language itself. One finds at the end

77

of the trilogy an expansion into a realm where the Western
ideas of matter, body, fact, and ego give way to a cosmologi-
cal embrace.

In concluding this analysis of Samsura and Nirvana
in terms of Samuel Beckett's trilogy, it would be beneficial
to hear Buddha's own words:

Through many a birth in existence wandered I,

Seeking in vain the builder of this house;

Sorrowful is repeated birth.

House-builder! I have found you;

Never shall you build your house again;

All your rafters are broken;

Your ridge-pole is shattered,

To Nibbana goes my mind;

The end of craving have I attained.9

Molloy, Moran, Malone, Macmann, and the Unnamable (who form
a chain of interrelated rebirths) find the 'houses' of
materialism, organized religion, and even consciousness in
ruins; they seek shelter in the roofless void of a Nirvana-
like state. Molloy and Moran are fated to live amidst the
rubble of shattered egos. Malone, through his writings,
seeks to clear a path out of a self-centered, object-oriented
world where a piece of string or a bicycle bell can burden
or inhibit life's metaphysical dimensions. The Unnamable
finds that his predecessors' path leads to a supreme Zero
where man finds his identity outside of Christian and Occi-
dental values. In the middle of the second novel Malone

concedes:

78

And perhaps there is none, no morrow any more, for

one who has waited so long for it in vain. And

perhaps he has come to that stage of his instant

when to live is to wander, the last of the living

in the depths of an instant without bounds. (p. 233)
This "instant" certainly has all the mysterious trappings of

Buddha's Nirvana.

The notions of Samsura and Nirvana are of invaluable
assistance in coming to grips with the progression of the
trilogy as a whole, yet particular images, scenes, and events

found in Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable can be analyzed

 

through other notions that are just as basic to Buddhism.
By focusing on one novel in particular much can be learned
about the Zen aspects of love, divinity, carnality, temporal

suffering, and death. In truly understanding Malone Dies

 

one must be prepared to leave Occidental illusions behind in
order to see the decadence, artificiality and neuroses which
have unfortunately become part of Occidental ideals. Hope-
fully, an Eastern perspective will not only offer a clearer
understanding of modern Western values but will also suggest
an alternative to the absurdity rampant in contemporary
society.

The precepts of organized religion, the ideals of
love and the reality of the material world have been long
held standards in Western civilization. The deeply meta-

physical beliefs of Asia may be used to advantage in analyzing

79

a modern literary character who rejects these standards.
Beckett's Malone shuns the hypocrisy of Christianity, paro-
dies romantic illusions in his ridiculous love affairs, and
sublimates his body to a state in which mental projections
are held as the ultimate reality. Truly his unique private
world may appear insane unless seen in the light of some
very relevant Oriental beliefs.

God, as known in Western terms, is nonexistent in

Malone Dies:

 

Our Father who art no more in heaven than on earth

or in hell, I neither want nor desire that thy name

be hallowed, Thou knowest best what suits thee. (p. 233)
Artists such as Camus, Sartre, and especially Beckett keep
reminding their readers, in no uncertain terms, that 'God is
truly dead.' Although Malone mentions various Catholic Holy
Days at the start of the book, one becomes painfully aware
that in Beckett's upside down, inside out universe Malone is
the only 'God' visible. As writer-protagonist, Malone creates
a fictional world, destroys what he considers improper (both
thematically and gramatically) and bunglingly reigns omniscient.
He has become modern Western man's godhead existing in divine
vanity and egocentricity. Lucky's description of the Old

Testament deity in WaitingyFor Godot is most applicable to

Malone--the 'Father':

80

Given the existence as uttered forth in the public

works of Puncher and Wattmann of a personal God

quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua outside

time without extension who from the heights of

divine apathia divine athambia divine aphasia loves

us dearly with some exceptions for reasons unknown

but time will tell and suffers like the divine

miranda . . . (p. 28)
On a less 'divine' level, it is not hard to find parallels
between the absurd tribulations of Malone's pitiful creation--
Sapo and Macmann--and the meaninglessness of modern man's
technologically sterile existence. Just as the West's "white-
bearded God" is uncomfortably mute in dealing with twentieth
century man's spiritual problems and disbelief, Malone is an
extremely myopic 'Creator':

I shall not answer any more questions. I shall even

try not to ask myself any more. While waiting I shall

tell myself stories, if I can. They will not be the

same kind of stories as hitherto, that is all. (p. 180)
If Godot is interpreted as God, it might very well be that
He, along with Vladimir and Estragon, is waiting also--a
useless biblical antique, whose resemblance to Malone is
quite apprOpriate in the contemporary Occidental spiritual
context. The bourgeois love of material objects has kept
alive in the West an external God whose superficiality is
harmonious to materialism. ”As in man's conception of real-
ity, so is the God whom he worships."10 Jehovah would not

be acceptable in the East for He is merely an outward deity;

for the Buddhist, Soul or Self is the only spiritual reality.

81

Malone, however, is unlike Jehovah in his cosmic stature and
inability to take his creations seriously. His literary
doodlings which can be stopped in mid-sentence or mid-life
with the greatest of ease are unimportant to his ultimate
metaphysical proposition--"Perhaps there is none, no morrow

any more" (p. 233). As can be seen in The Unnamable, Malone

 

has transcended into a being of inordinate proportions and
thus is capable, finally, of taking on the cosmic proportions
of Nirvana.

Love is another concept that Beckett comically strips
of traditional value. Like the Western concept-of God, love--
with its romantic denotations--is not placed highly among,
Buddha's truths. Webster's Dictionary begins its definition
of love with-~"a feeling of strong personal attachment . .

for another."11

Such a meaning would be in keeping with the
Occident's belief that an external object (in this case
another person) can be possessed by another. The East, on
the other hand, does not believe in this 'possession' since
it does not take for granted the ultimate reality of physical
being. In the state of Nirvana, for instance, man cannot
belong to another or heTe eh to anything because he already
encompasses and (at the same time) is part of the entire
cosmos. Needless to say, love in the Buddhist tradition

differs radically from the Western ideals of romance parodied

in Malone Dies. According to the Buddha, there is no onto-

 

logical reality in mere physical being alone. Thus, man can

82

only find disillusionment in seeking to emotionally or sexually
possess another. Malone is disenchanted with romantic love,
and his tale of Mac and Moll illustrates it. The two octo-
genarians with their sentimental letters, nauseating physical
encounters, and regrets that they had not met sixty years
sooner are pathetic pictures of love.
The Buddhist Arhat's--or monk's--contemplative,

ascetic existence is crucial to his entrance into Nirvana,
for his sentiments are not turned toward any particular per-
son but are centered on the spiritual unity of the universe.
Like the Arhat, Mac realizes that the loss of another's love
(in this case Moll's) is of little importance since physical
or romantic sensations and feelings have nothing to do with
finding Oneness or Self. At the end of their romance [ushered
in by Moll's loss of hair, her uncontrollable spasms of vomit-
ing, and such statements as--"Moll . . . I'm goint to kill
her" (p. 262)] Macmann clearly sees the wisdom of Buddhist
'lovelessness':

Then, all alone and unobserved, he continued to

behave as if beside himself, which is proof posi-

tive, is it not, that he was disinterested . . .

And when he grew calm again at last he mourned the

long immunity he had lost, from shelter, charity,

and human tenderness. And he even carried his

inconsequence to the length of wondering what

right anyone had to take care of him. (p. 262)

The minimal credence that Samuel Beckett's characters

put in a "white bearded God” is repeated in their ideas on.

83

love; they eventually find romance a token of immeasurable
silliness, if not downright disgust. God's creed of 'Love
thy neighbor' seems rather odd if He is no more imposing than
Malone sitting helpless amongst his bed covers.

The death of God and the waning of romantic notions

are clearly brought to the fore in Malone Dies and establish

 

Beckett's pervasive notion of the fundamental decay of
Christianity in the modern age. Moll dies right after she
loses the tooth carved like a crucifix; on a symbolic level
this is no mere coincidence. With the gradual dissolution

of Christian beliefs, the decline of its accompanying virtues
and ideals (love, grace, hope, charity, etc.) should not be
too surprising. Essentially, Moll's rotten crucifix tooth
represents the final disintegration of Occidental religion.-
In its wake an offensive morality based on the physical and
material has appeared. The sick relationship between the

two eighty-year-olds has been fostered by a society that no
longer finds salvation in the spiritual. Christian 'love',
the most expansive and emancipative of all spiritual forces,
has all too often been stereotyped, degraded, and ignored

in the present century. Either Malone must repeat the love
parody over and over again or be content in his solitude;

he chooses the latter course. To be able to live with one-
SeTT, and thus all of creation, is the only type of love that

can end Samsura and penetrate Nirvana. Beckett realizes that

84

'God is he longer love' in the contemporary religious con-

text. He surely agrees with what the Buddha says:

Therefore whatever there be of corporeality, feeling,
perception, mental formations or conciousness, whether
past, present, or future, one's own or external, gross:
or subtle, lofty or low, far or near, one should under-
stand according to reality and true wisdom: This does 12
not belong he he. This 22.1.2233 This i§.22£.EX Self.

 

 

Love, therefore, cannot be taught in church, created in

trashy magazines, and generated in pornographic films--it
resides outside of understanding, according to Buddha, and
beyond egocentric consciousness. Its existence is inextricably
bound within the union of one's Self or Soul with all of crea-
tion and in the Nirvana of all things.

The Buddhist employs a spiritual method to counter-
balance life's temporal absurdities and sufferings, while
Western man resorts more and more to the employment of
material resources to abate his spiritual hunger. In Malone
hTee the narrator seems convinced that this latter way of.
dealing with the void of modern existence is hopeless, and
he turns, in a subconscious manner, toward metaphySical values
belonging to the East.

One of the Eastern values or premises that is obscured
in the Westerner's scramble for comfort and luxury, is that
mortal life can mean nothing more than suffering. Malone
realizes that existence cannot be sugar coated with the

tatters of materialism and accepts his naked, toothless and

85

impotent lot. He knows the complete absurdity of hoping fer

a better physical existence outside of his bed. With this'
acceptance, Malone resembles the Buddhist. Although his style
is a bit monotonous, Buddha's message relating to secular life
is made with sledge-hammer clarity: "Birth is suffering;
separation from the loved ones is suffering; not to get what

13 Indeed, it is not a rosy

one desires is suffering; etc."
picture. Malone would certainly not quarrel with the Eastern
prophet's interpretation of transitory, daily existence. In
fact, he elaborates on it:
For the rain could cease without his ceasing to suffer
. . . For people are never content to suffer, but they
must have heat and cold, rain and its contrary . . .
in short, the furies and frenzies happily too numerous
to be numbered of the body including the skull and its
annexes, whatever that means, such as the clubfoot, in
order that they may know very precisely what exactly
it is that dares prevent their happiness from being
unalloyed. (p. 199)

The Buddhist, and Easterners in general, believe that
suffering is inescapable and that one's physical being is a
constant reminder of this fact. The Buddhist monk believes
that the living as well as the dead body is "impure, ill-

14 With such knowledge

smelling, disgusting, and abominable."
he sees that the flesh is something which must be endured
and not idolized. On the whole, Beckett's characters are a
literally sickening group, and they are the first to admit

it. Malone writes:

86

My sight and hearing are very bad . . . all my senses
are trained full on me, me. Dark and silent and stale,
I am no prey for them . . . my stupid flesh . . . my
witless remains. (p. 235)

A Buddhist description of the organism called man runs parallel

to the above quote:

a resort inhabited by worms, an abode of disease where
filth from the eyes oozes from the two eyes . . . ex-
crements and water from the openings below. Since the
human body is bI5 a bag of filth, why should one become
attached to it.

Moll's blobber lips, long yellow canines bared to the roots,
bald head and habit of vomiting incessantly are the earthly
remains that Mac, in the decadent Western inclinations toward
the gross and corporeal, is attracted to: "the sight of her
so diminished did not damp Mac's desire to take her, all
stinking, yellow, bald and vomiting, in his arms." (p. 199)
In identifying one's self with the physical, believes the
Buddhist, the individual centers himself on the impermanent
world and denies the Universal Soul.

As the Buddha taught, identification with the corporeal
is the cause of suffering in the first place: craving pro-
duces rebirth, clinging to the passions results in losing
track of the spiritual or that which 'transcends'. Con-
sciousness spawns even more suffering if it is focused on

mortal lusts and fears. In Malone Dies:

 

And truth to tell the ideas of guilt and punishment
were confused together in his mind, as those of cause
and effect so often are in the minds of those who

87

continue to think. And it was often in fear and

trembling that he suffered saying, This will cost

me dear. (p. 232)
Pain and distress are integral parts of existence, but Malone
and his Buddhist confederates realize that the body, instead
of being pampered, should be dismissed if any peace is to be
found in life. In his almost Nirvanic state, it is little
wonder that the Unnamable's physical appearance has become so
indefinite.

Besides illustrating the West's crumbling perceptions
of God, love, and spirituality, Malone also gives insights
into a mental state remarkably similar to Nirvana. Malone's
position on his bed might very well be the lotus position
for he realizes that the void at the center of life does not
necessarily have to be negative. He is like a Buddhist monk--
reflecting, concentrating, meditationg and readying himself

for the apotheosis of Nirvana. In Psalms of the Early_

 

Buddhists, a monk is quoted:

My heart stands like a rock, and swayeth not,

Void of all lust and things that lust beget,

And all unshakened in a shifting world, 16

My heart thus trained, whence shall come ill to me?
Though Malone's similes are not as concrete, the state of
his soul is just as immutable: "I shall be neutral and inert"
(p. 180); "I go liquid and become like mud" (p. 181); "an

old foetus, that's what I am now, hear and impotent" (p. 181).

.Malone is similar to his Buddhist compatriots in an even mere

88

subtle aspect--he has reached the end of his rope (his last

link in the chain of rebirths) and prepares for a final incar-
nation. That is, he represents the final phase in an evolu-
tion of Beckettian characters and seeks to abandon the material,
physical dimension to which they were interminably bound. JuSt
what the new dimension specifically consists of remains as

enigmatic as Nirvana. Malone writes:

This time I know where I am going, it is no longer
the ancient night, the recent night . . . From now
on it will be different . . . All my life long I
have put off this reckoning, saying, Too soon, too
soon. All my life long I have dreamt of the moment
when, edified at last, in so far as one can be
before all is lost, I might draw the line and make
the tot. This moment seems now at hand. I shall
not lose my head on that account. (p. 183)

When Malone ceases to write at the end of the novel and
becomes even more paralyzed, he leaves the physical plane
and enters a realm beyond space and time. Buddha realized
that one should avoid "attachment to worldly enjoyment which

n17

is base, vulgar . . . ignoble and profitless. Malone

also acknowledges the reality of such an existence:

I shall be natural at last, I shall suffer more,

than less, without drawing any conclusions, I

shall pay less heed to myself, I shall be neither

hot nor cold anymore, I shall be tepid. (p. 179)
Malone comes as close as possible to describing the vital
Plenum-Void at the center of Buddhism.

A comparison between Buddha's and Malone's words

offers some revelation into the meaning of a faith so

‘1 “ I |l li‘lfilllilll‘lnll l 'nl‘l'llll' ! [II II

89

infinitely removed from Western materialism. In his eightieth
year, shortly before dying, the Buddha related to his com-

panions:

There arose in me the knowledge and insight--
unshakable is the deliverance of my mind; this
is may last birth and there shall be for me no
existence again. 8

Beckett's protagonist has a premonition of equal significance:

And there comes the hour when nothing more can

happen and nobody more can come and all is ended

by the waiting that knows itself in vain. (p. 234)
With such feelings, the Eastern philosopher and absurd
paraplegic view phenomenal existence; through the former's
teachings and the latter's stories one witnesses metaphysical

truths that lead to the Plenum-Void. Just as the narrator's

."inventory" fades into obscurity at the end of Malone Dies,

 

one day (most likely from an Eastern influence) Western man
will come face to face with his Self--bereft of his material
possessions and transitory loves. Once this takes place he
will more fully appreciate the tramps, vagrants, and cripples
the inhabit Beckett's canon. Gogo, Didi, Malone and the
others are fanatically aware of a Being, Presence, or Power
that defies description, knowledge and possession but is
nonetheless omniscient. As of now, this force is more clearly
associated with the East, but it will one day prove to be

the antidote for the Occident's poisonous materialistic

90

tendencies. Malone already sees the light of its salvation.
In the following lines he views the strength and urgency of

the West's mislaid Soul:

Then that silence of which, knowing what I know, I

shall merely say that there is nothing, how shall

I merely say, nothing negative about it. And softly

my little space begins to throb again. You may say

it is all in my head, and indeed sometimes it seems

to me I am in a head . . . (p. 233)

In dealing with a mystical state such as Nirvana.

definitions and explanations become totally ineffective.
Just as the theatre has altered its conventions of time,
place, and character to cope with the Absurd experience of
the modern age, the novel has also radically changed such
features as plot, character development, and narrative tech-
nique in order to relate to existential philosophy. In effect,
the modern novelist perceives the literary traditions upheld
for centuries no longer applicable when dealing with a world
falling apart at the seams. For instance, can a plot with
suspense, climax and denouement be formulated for a character
like Malone? Can the traditional techniques of narrative art
be applied to a paralyzed insomniac who finds meaninglessness
in almost everything? Or, to go even further, can modern
man forge ahead with progress and technology when he finds
their rewards uncomfortably and hopelessly sterile? The
radical changes in the novel in the past fifty to seventy-

five years are indicative of an extremely self-conscious and

troubling way of perceiving modern existence. This relatively

91

new aesthetic can be better understood if, compared to certain
Zen Buddhist principles.

In her essay "The Aesthetics of Silence," Susan
Sontag sees a close parallel between Zen teaching and twentieth

century anti-literature:

As the activity of the mystic must end in Via

Ne ativa--a theology of God's absense, a craving

for the cloud of unknowingness beyond knowledge

and for silence beyond speech--so art must tend

toward anti-art, the elimination of the 'subject'

. . . the substitution of chgnge for intention,

and the pursuit of silence.
The Buddhist's acceptance of temporal suffering and Nothingness
in order to find the truly immortal Self is also found in
Samuel Beckett's art. For the existentialist, death is accepted
as the irremediable fact that must color all of life's exper-
iences. With such a belief Sartre, Camus, and especially
Beckett view the limitations of mortality as unalterably knit
with the fabric of consciousness. That is, their novels
are concerned with death and the abyss as thoroughly as the
art of previous eras had been concerned with, for example,
war, love, or material success. Obviously, literary specu-
lation on death and nothingness leads to novels that can no
longer project rational answers, give logical opinions, or
even dare to ascertain what 'reality' is. Obscurity and
inscrutability become part of contemporary aesthetic terri-
tory.

This strange new territory of the modern novel has‘

been explored by the Zen artist for centuries; he recognizes

92

that union with all creation can be found only when man
accepts mortal decay and the meaninglessness of the material
world. Like the Zen poet, the modern anti-novelist finds
in the apocalyptic landscape of purely temporal existence a
new (existential) creative force. For Samuel Beckett, des-
pair and negativity lead to a unique poetic diction and form.
In the subsequent pages dealing with Beckett's longer
prose works, anti-literature will be held to the light of
Eastern wisdom. The two early novels--Murphy (1938) and Thee

(1942) as well as the latest novel How It Is (196l)--are

 

representative of a relatively new type of literature that
refuses to use the traditions of Western thought and art as
major creative premises. The anti-novel explores the modern
abyss and proves that art, like man, can survive the loss of
Occidental ideals and conventions. Most importantly, the
various aspects of the anti-novel's protagonist, literary
style, and especially 'theme' are disposed toward basic Zen
precepts.

To begin, Samuel Beckett's protagonists could never
be called 'heroic'. Murphy and Watt are incorrigible bums
who for the most part of their lives have had little connec-
tion with family, friends and steady employment. They are a.
new breed of solipsists whose lives are without motive, drive
or any significant value. They do, however, find nihility
particularly attractive. Murphy, throughout his education

in Dublin, affair with the prostitute Celia, and brief

93

employment at Magdalen Mental Mercyseat seeks a type of
Nirvanic state in his rocking chair. Stripped and strapped
to this chair, he is "set free in his mind . . . and life in
his mind gave him pleasure, such pleasure that pleasure was

not the word."20

Celia, who eventually becomes addicted to
the chair herself, finds it capable of giving an experience

quite similar to the Buddhist Plenum-Void:

She got out of her clothes and into the rocking chair.
Now the silence above was a different silence, no
longer strangled. The silence not of vacuum but of
plenum, not of breath taken but of quiet air . . .
She . . . was in . . . the all of her mind, teasing
the oakum of her history. Then it was finished,
the days and places and things and people were un-
twisted and scattered . . . she had no history. (p. 118)
It is not surprising that Murphy should die while in the
rocking chair, for he finds in it a state remarkably close
to a complete denial of mortality. Mr. Knott (Not?) has
an analogous function (i.e. to Murphy's rocking chair) in the
novel Watt. This curious man's person and environment display
an aura that Watt finds absolutely satisfying in a Nirvanic

sense:

But to Mr. Knott, and with Mr. Knott, and from Mr.
Knott, were a coming and a being and a going ex-
empt from languor, exempt from fever, for Mr. Knott
was harbour, Mr. Kngit was haven, calmly entered,
freely ridden . .

Although Knott is Watt's master and his customs and habits
are repeated at length, he remains an unrecognizable, physically

indistinct character throughout the entire book.

94

In short, Murphy and Watt are obsessed with states
and people that are beyond the realm of time, place and
reason. Their entire lives revolve around a new anti-
religion which is, to be as precise as possible, the absense
of all faith. The heritage of Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant and
Hegel is lost to them; they embrace the experience of Nothing-
ness. Murphy and Watt defy Western values and, like devout
Buddhists, empty their worlds of external realities. The

narrator-protagonist of How It Is is deprived of almost all

 

physical comforts and possessions; his entire life consists
of crawling in the mud with a few inconsequential materials

on his back. He rapidly approaches the "Degree Zero"--"a

22

blessed place to be." This strange narrator is even more

rapt in the desire for Nothingness than his literary prede-

cessors Watt and Murphy:

but how can you think and speak at the same time,
without a special gift your thoughts wander, your
words to far apart, no, that's an exaggeration,
apart, between them would be the place to be . .
Bereft of speech, bereft of thought and feel no-
thing, hear nothing, know nothing, say nothing,
are nothing. That would be a blessed place to
be, Where you are. (p. 324)

Murphy, Watt and "I" of How It Is move, in the course of

 

their lives, toward Nirvana and, consequently, wind up losing
all vestiges of solipsism. Whether through a rocking chair,
a Godot-like master, or grovelling in mud, they move away from

a personal conception of self and realize that beyond physical

95

existence and perception there is a state of universal Soul.
The anti-novel does its best to imagistically relay this
metaphysical, Eastern orientation of Self, but ultimately

it must depend on illogic and mystery in order to do so.

In the abovementioned novels the literary style is
an outgrowth of the nihilistic theme; language and structure
must accurately convey the Nirvanic Void. For instance, Watt
will go on for pages and pages with intolerably convoluted
rationalizations that, in the end, altogether cancel each
other out. In the following quotation Watt's movements are
described so thoroughly that it seems as though he is every-
where at once (or nowhere at all). Basically, the exagger-
ated importance placed on his physical actions mirrors the

complete absurdity and insignificance of his existence.

Here he moved, to and fro, from the door to the
window, from the window to the door . . . from
the fire to the bed, from the bed to the fire,
from the bed to the fire, from the fire to the
bed; from the door to the fire, from the fire to
the door; from the fire to the door, from the
door to the fire; from the window to the bed,
from the bed to the window [ad nauseum]

(P. 81)

As Beckett's novels progress from Murphy and Watt

to the trilogy and finally to How It Is, they become far

 

less structured. Murphy's quasi-adventures give way to Watt's
aimless wanderings and "1's" crawlings in the abyssmal depths.
Language follows a similar route. In the first two novels,

words are relatively straightforward and praCtially alwayS'

96

strung in complete sentences. Yet with the passage of Beckett's
career they turn upon themselves and become less and less a

means of imparting the story's information. In How It Is

 

the words are analogous to a psychotic's mumblings and frag-
mented speech patterns. Language, as Beckett shows the
reader,.becomes almost useless as one realizes the spiritual
realm of Nirvana. Indeed, the enigmatic musings of the Self
are incapable of verbal expressions. The following quotation
from Thee is appropriate since it shows in what ways speech
must finally deal with the spiritual world that is beyond its

grasp:

No, he could never have spoken at all of these
things, if all had continued to mean nothing . . .
For the only way one can speak of nothing is to
speak of it as though it were something, just as
the only way one can speak of God is to speak of
him as though he were a man, which to be sure he
was, in a sense, for a time, and as the only way
one can speak of man, even our anthropologists
have realized that, is to speak of him as though
he were a termite. (p. 204)

Keeping Watt's 'logic' in mind, we can easily see why Beckett's
plays drop words completely and have turned to mime in recent
years.

Nihility, a state sought by Murphy, Watt and their
descendants in the dramas, overshadows all literary considera-
tions in the anti-novel and progressively breaks down even the
printed page. In Weep the words "Krick," "Krak," and "Krek"

take up almost two pages, the spaces between them punctuated

97

23

with ellipsis. In How It Is words are reduced to stammers

 

and lines to fragments. In the next passage it is easy to

see that "yes" becomes the last remnant of 'factuality':

. . . in the mud yes to the mud yes my voice yes
mine yes not another's no mine alone yes sure yes
when the panting stops yes on and off yes a few.
words yes a few scraps yes that no one hears no
but less and less no answer less and less yes.

(p. 19)

Beckett's progressive need throughout his novels to
abandon words is understandable if one keeps in mind that
Nothingness, in the Eastern sense, can never be communicated
on a rational plane. In placing language in this strange new
light, Samuel Beckett comes to grips with Buddhist teachings.
Buddha's overriding silence and (when he did speak) elusively

subtle words were meant, explains Eastern scholar Edmond

Holmes, for

'those who understand' that the language of paradox
and negation has a meaning; but paradoxes bewilder
the uninitiated, and the language of negation is
apt to he mistaken for the language of denial and
revolt.

The art of Nothingness and the Void must, of necessity, be
one of silence and omission. Buddha, with his faith in a
Self beyond words and consciousness was incapable of setting
down his truths in formulae, for the laws of language would
make such an understanding impossible. "Some scholars be-
lieve that his own attitude towards great matters was one

of helpless bewilderment."25

98

In Murphy, a short dialogue between Neary and Wylie
(out to break up the protagonist's engagement to the girl
he left in Dublin) sums up the value of verbal communication
as long as modern man refuses to go beyond his strictly .

Western insights:

"I declare" said Neary, "sometimes you talk as great

tripe as Murphy." "Once a certain degree of insight

has been reached" said Wylie, "all men talk, when

talk they must, the same tripe." (p. 115)
With Murphy, Beckett's preoccupation with the meaning of
words becomes clear. He feels words are inadequate and lack
all significance when compared to states of being lying at
the heart of existence--ex. 'the rocking chair oblivion'.
Even Celia, who loves Murphy and remains closest to him

throughout the novel, is at a loss to understand him ver-

bally:

She felt, as she felt so often with Murphy, spattered
with words that went dead as soon as they sounded;
each word obliterated, before it had time to make

sense, by the word that came next; so that in the end
she did not know what had been said. It was like
difficult music heard for the first time. (p.62)
The breakdown of speech and the destruction of language in
Beckett's novels is indicative of anti-literature's concern

with the "inward life of the soul," a life that cannot be

gilded by materialism, words or even conscious thought.

In conclusion, Samuel Beckett's anti-novels reflect

the apocalypse of the twentieth century and, in effect, offer

99

an alternative to Western religious, moral and emotional
deterioration. In the trilogy the main characters wander in
deserted winter forests and barren foggy beaches, and vege-

tate in tiny, sterile rooms--"wombs of a dead and rotting

26

mother." The apocalyptic highway at the beginning of

Molloy--"a road remarkably bare . . . without hedges or

27

ditches or any kind of edge" --seems to coil out of The

Waste Land: "The road winding above among the mountains/

 

. . mountains of rock without water/ . . . Dead mountain

mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit."28

29

Molloy calls the
landscape "this accursed country" just as Isaiah foresaw

"a curse devour[ing] the earth."30 Molloy (in a ditch at the
edge of the forest), Malone (in his mother's room), and the
Unnamable ("in equilibrium somewhere"31) have become Isaiah's
"prisoners in a pit . . . shut up in a prison."32 Malone

speaks for the whole crew of Beckett's literary tramps when

he says:

And indeed the silence at times is such that the

earth seems uninhabited . . . You have only to

hear nothing for a few days, in your whole . . .

and you begin to fancy yourself the last of human

kind. (p. 232)

The increasing absurdity of Western life has been

displayed with undiluted power in the Theatre of the Absurd,
but it has also been forcefully dealt with in novels that no

longer take themselves, let alone the culture in which they

were created, seriously. Like a Buddhist, the anti-novelist

100

cannot identify with the usual modes of Western existence--
materialism, luxury, phantasy, bourgeois complacency--for he
has gained an almost Zen perspective on reality itself.
Malone, as a writer, more often than not discredits his
constructed narrative with disconcerting repetition. For-

example:

Macmann was fiercely reprimanded by Lemuel who
wrenched the pretty flower from his hands and
threatened to hand him over to Jack again, no
to Pat again. Jack is a different one . . .
Problem. But nicely posed, I think, very
nicely posed. (p. 275)

Just as little children dissect toys to analyze the
various pieces after their novelty has worn off, the modern
writer dismembers his art to find what makes it tick. Lan-
guage is unmasked of mythic symbol, history, and structure in
order to stress the "incommunicable essence" that spawned it.
Malone writes in the middle of his narrative--"There is no
use indicting words, they are no shoddier than what they
peddle." (p. 275) The narrator and main characters of the
anti-novel are constantly fighting the literary discipline
and values imposed on them, for example, by Balzac or Henry
James. The narrators of Beckett's anti-novels not only tell
'stories' (which they do very badly) they, more importantly,
reflect on the fact that they are attempting to do so.

Malone admits that he is inexperienced in writing, but also

expresses his lack of concern with the narrative in the first

place:

101

The fact would seem to be, if in my situation one

may speak of facts, not only that I shall have to

speak of things of which I cannot speak, but 3150.

which is even more interesting, that I, which is

if possible even more interesting, that I shall

have to, I forget, no matter. (p. 193)
The anti-novelist and his creations are wont to remind the
reader that writing has become a mere game, a hobby of little
consequence when compared to the malaise that plagues man in
the modern abyss. It often seems that he is "trying to
peddle" what has long ago lost all meaning. If such is the
case, he must find a new ware to peddle. The East provides

a new perspecitve and literary stockyard. In the following

passage from How It Is, the narrator finds his wisdom in an

 

alternative to Western religious thought (if the "sardine"

is viewed as the Christian fish symbol):

. . . that for the likes of us and no matter how

we are recounted there is more nourishment in a
cry, nay a sigh torn from one whose only good is
silence or in speech extorted from one at last
delivered from its use than sardines can offer.

(P. 69)
It is a premise of this thesis that the "one at last delivered"
from speech is the Easterner with his spiritual, mystical
search for universal Nirvana. In realizing the lost meaning
of Christianity and the new faith of silence or Self, "I"

in How It Is turns toward Zen Buddhism, just as Beckett did

 

early in his career.

CHAPTER IV

EASTERN INFLUENCE ON THE EARLY WORKS--
PROUST, POEMS AND THE SHORT STORIES

The effects of Eastern philosophy are felt as much
in Samuel Beckett's earliest works as they are in the novels
and plays. In his Master's thesis (Proust 1931), poems

(Whoroscope 1930, Echo's Bones 1935, Quatre Poemes 1937)

 

 

and short stories (More Pricks Than Kicks 1934) a sharp break

 

with Western ideals is immediately noticeable while a leaning
toward Oriental thought slowly emerges. Of course, the poems
and short stories lack the mature self-confidence of works
done during and after Wrold War II, but they stand as proof
of Beckett's mystical affinities with Zen.

Beckett's interest in Marcel Proust during his
graduate studies in Dublin and Paris is the first substantial
clue to his preoccupation with Eastern philosophic and artis-

tic ideals. Donald Keene in Japanese Literature: An Intro-

 

duction for Western Readers says that the only Western book
appearing to be anything like the classic Oriental work The

Tale of GengT is Marcel Proust's A la Recherche du Tempe
l

 

 

Perdu.
Like Proust, Beckett's fascination with the element
of time in art leads to parallels with Zen Buddhist beliefs.

102

 

Ill I'll" I‘ll I lll'Irll'clnI
ll inllll

103

In "A Few Don't's By An Imagist" Ezra Pound in 1912 declared
that aspects of time in haiku could be used to the modern

Western artist's advantage:

[The image is] that which presents an intellectual
and emotional complex in an instant of time . . .
It is the presentation of such a 'complex' instan-
taneously which gives that sense of sudden libera-
tion; that sense of freedom from time limits and
space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which
we expeEience in the presence of the greatest works

of art.
Proust's expansive use of "instants of time" (evoked from
such images as the madeleine steeped in tea and the uneven
cobbles in the courtyard of the Guermante's Hotel, to name
just a few) certainly affected Beckett. Although Proust
referred to the haiku "sense of freedom . . . and sudden
liberation" as "Involuntary Memory," his parallels with
Pound's Oriental outlooks are easily recognizable. Along
with the French novelist and the American poet, Beckett saw
that time within a work of art could be "an immediate, total
and delicious deflagration."3 In Proust he reveals a deep
similarity to the haiku poet's ideal of "a moment [which] is

anti-temporal and qualitatively eterna1"4:

Involuntary memory restores, not merely the past object,
but the Lazarus that it charmed or tortured, not merely
Lazarus and the object, but more because less, more be-
cause it abstracts the useful, the opportune, the acci-
dental, because in its flame it has consumed Habit and
all its works, and in its brightness revealed what the
mock reality of experience never can and never will
reveal--the real. (p. 33)

104

The Imagist poets were concerned with the artistic
expression of "the real" and thus found haiku most helpful.

Cleanth Brooks in Modern Poetryyand the Tradition writes:

The refusal to accept the scientific account

in matters where the scientific method is valid

and relevant is unrealistic, but there is nothing

'escapist' about a hostility to science which

orders science gff the premises where it has no

business to be.
At the turn of the century artists such as T. S. Eliot,
William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound and Samuel Beckett found in
Oriental aesthetics an alternative to the scientific, materi-
alistic conceptions that had bound Western culture. They
sought a new means of experiencing mystical, spiritual realms
ignored by an increasingly technological society. By pre-
senting images without rationalistic motives and legical
progression, the poets influenced by the East went beyond

mere ideas and entered an intuitive realm long valued by Zen

Buddhists. The Japanese critic Isoji A56 says:

What governs such an art [i.e. haiku] is not a
concept or logic, or rationalism . . . Even if
we find an idea in it, that idea is something
diffused throughout the entirety of the art
product, like the air.
His theoretics in Proust and also his poems and stories show

that Beckett sought such an art.

In the late 1920's Beckett was a close friend (some

say personal secretary) of the already established James

105

Joyce. Having extreme difficulty with his eyes, Joyce often
needed help with his voluminous manuscripts and Beckett,

along with other young students and writers, provided his
literary services. The following quote by Richard Ellman
attests to the §eTT analysis, or mystical contemplative state,
which both artists found essential; the two Irishmen, in
meditative silence and Buddha's lotus position, seem beyond

Western ideals handed down by Descartes:

Beckett was addicted to silences, and so was Joyce;
they engaged in conversations which consisted often
of silences toward each other, both suffused with
sadness, Beckett mostly for the world, Joyce mostly
for himself. Joyce sat in his habitual posture,
legs crossed, toe of the upper leg under the instep
of the lower, Beckett also tall and slender, fell
into the same gesture.

In The Japanese Haiku: Its Essential Nature, History and

Possibilities, Kenneth Yasuda quotes Joyce and shows that

 

beside his Nirvanic silences, the Irish author, like Beckett,
felt that art should be above and beyond rational (Western)

boundaries:

'The dramatic form is reached when the vitality
which has flowed and eddied around each person
fills every person with such vital force that
he or she assumes a proper and intangible aesthe-
tic life. The personality of the artist . . .
finally refines itself out of existence, imper-
sonalizes itself, so to speak . . . The mystery
of aesthetic, like the God of creation, remains
within or behind or beyond or above his handi-
work, invisible, refined out of ex§stence, in-
different paring his fingernails.‘

106

Joyce might just as well be describing the intentions of the
haiku poet or Imagist, for, according to Yasuda, "the poet
is to avoid the sentimentalism of seeing his world only in
terms of his own emotions."9 Beckett also realizes that the
poet must ”not deal in concepts [but] pursue the Idea, the
concrete." He says of Proust in particular:

He admires the frescoes of the Paduan Arena because

their symbolism is handled as a reality, special,

literal and concrete, and is not merely the pictorial

transmission of a notion. (p. 79)

T. S. Eliot's "objective correlative," like the

"mystery of aesthetic” propounded by Joyce, can also be paral-

leled in Beckett's Eastern learnings. In The Sacred Wood

 

Eliot says: ”poetry is something over and above, and some-
thing quite different from, a collection of psychological
data about the minds of poets, or about the history of an

epoch.”10

Similarly to Beckett in Proust, Eliot stressed
an accurate presentation of subjective reality without the
inculcation of a morality or the bonds of convention. "Eliot
believed" says Gertrude Patterson, "that great writing should
present thought 'stripped to theaessential structure' . . .
through a method similar to the Japanese 'hokku'."11
Beckett certainly had no Christian qualms about
gaining inspiration from the East since he had given up his

Quaker heritage long before his introduction to avant garde

circles in Paris and London. He has stated:

107

Once I had a religious emotion. It was my

first communion. No more . . . The family

was Protestant, but for me it was only irk-

some and I let it go.12
His decision to give up an academic career in the late 1920's
reinforced his independence; and his attraction to haiku, as
will be seen, showed a deep belief in certain Zen ideals.
Through his interest in Proust and use of haiku, Beckett
discovered much more than stylistic and structural lessons.
Zen Buddhism, rather than Christian doctrines and nineteenth
century literary conventions, became Beckett's philosophic
salvation. John Gould Fletcher writes:

What we learn from the Japanese and their poetry

is something that may help to lead poetry back

to first principles which surely should come first;

and should lead some of the more intelligent moderns

to cast off the burden of too-conscious intellectua-

lism that they carry. For the merit of these haiku

poems is not.only that they suggest much by saying

little; they also, if understood in connection with

the Zen doctrine they illuminate, make of poetry an

act of life.
In an interview with George Duthuit in 1949 Beckett said:
"The time is perhaps not altogether too green for the vile
suggestion that art has nothing to do with clarity, does not
dabble in the clear and does not make clear."14 In the
following pages of this chapter one will see that the above

statement could very well have been made by Beckett twenty

years earlier. Like Proust, Beckett saw that logic and

108

rationality could not withstand the onslaughts of a meta-

physics grounded in Eastern mysticism.

The Proustian equation is never simple. The
unknown, choosing its weapons from a hoard of
values, is also the unknowable. (Proust, p. 11)

With the above sentences Samuel Beckett begins his
Master's thesis on Marcel Proust and suggests the type of
literature he would be writing throughout his career. Essen-
tially, the esoteric, almost mystical quality of Beckett's
poems, short stories, novels, and plays is conveyed through
an aesthetic that breaks with traditional Western values
in much the same way that the ”Proustian equation" did. In
The Religion of Art in Proust, Barbara J. Bucknall devotes
her last chapter to the effects of Buddhism on the late nine-
teenth century French novelist. Though she admits there is
no documented evidence of Proust's contact with Eastern
teachings, Dr. Bucknall closely parallels Oriental beliefs
with the writer's thematic as well as structural elements.15
Since Beckett studied Proust with sincere intensity during
his graduate studies at Trinity College in Dublin, it is
more than likely that he recognized in the novelist certain
tendencies which had no place in Occidental artistic modes.

In the first pages of Proust, Samuel Beckett views

the writer in terms that would have seemed anarchistic to

his Victorian and Romantic predecessors:

109

He [Proust] accepts regretfully the sacred ruler

and compass of literary geometry. But he will

refuse to extend his submission to spatial scales,

he will refuse to measure the length and weight

of man in terms of his body instead of in terms

of his years. (p. 12)
In effect, Beckett opts for a new literature without the
inhibitions of plot, neatly defined character, and conven-
tional narrative techniques. ”Spatial scales" and the "body"
of structure give way to the "mystic experience as the
Leitmotiv of . . . composition" (p. 35). In Proust Beckett
advocates

a neuralgia rather than a theme, persistent and

monotonous, [which] disappears beneath the sur-

face and emerges a still finer and more nervous

structure, enriched with a strange and necessary

incrustation of grace notes, a more confident and

essential statement of reality . . . climb[ing]

through a series of precisions and purifications

to the pinnacle from which it commands and clari-

fies the most humble incident of its ascent and

delivers its triumphant ultimatum. (p. 35)
Thus 'experiences' replace 'themes' as valid literary goals.
For Proust and Beckett, 'reality' loses the structure, form,
and objectivity that previous writers had all too often
imposed on it.

With such an aesthetic theory "style is more a

question of vision than of technique" (3, p. 87). Beckett
firmly believes that Proust "does not share the superstition

. . . that the ideal literary masterpiece can only be communi-

cated in a series of obsolete and monosyllabic propositions"

 

110

(p. 88). Consequently, it is hard to analyze Beckett's and
Proust's creative 'vision' in the rhetorical terms usually
associated with literary criticism (i.e., structure, thematic
content, point of view, etc.) because of its mystical conno-
tations. Although it would be much to presumptuous to refer

to the narrator of Remembrance of Things Past as Marcel

 

Proust himself--describing actual autobiographical trans-
cendent states--, it is fairly safe to state that Proust

does employ a literary style more closely associated with

Zen Buddhist mysticism than Romanticism or Symbolism. Beckett
sees Proust's method of creation as distinctly different from
Keats's or Verlaine's. "The terrible panic-stricken stasis

of Keats" he writes, "--crouched in a mossy thicket, annulled,
like a bee, in sweetness, 'drowsed with the fume of poppies'"
(pp. 90-91) is entirely alien to Proust's meditative states

in his cork-lined bedroom--dark, airless, completely shut off

from nature. The Romantic artist, consciously aware of his

 

inspiration through nature and memory, is, according to
Beckett, prone to "sensationalize" what must be inherent and
intuitive. Whereas the Romantic is basically concerned with
nature, Proust explores an "unmanifest Reality." Poets such
as Shelley and Baudelaire found external phenomena to be the
initiators of positive artistic responses; Keats's Grecian
Urn, for example, triggered allusions to "Truth" and "Beauty."
Proust's style, on the other hand, differs from even the

Symbolists in that he deals with the inherent or intrinsic

 

111

reality of an image. Like the Zen artist, he does not need
to make 'allusions' since the image is a symbol of itself.

Beckett explains:

When the subject is exempt from will, the object
is exempt from causality . . . purified in the
transcendental aperception that can capture the
Model, the Idea, the Thing in itself. (pp. 22-
23)

With such a theory in mind the"madeleine" is viewed by the
narrator BEE as a key, signal or reflex to something else
but as in itself intrinsically significant.

"The Proustian stasis” writes Beckett, "is contem-
plative, a pure act of understanding, willless, the 'amabilis
insania'” (p. 91). Meditative introspection, total mental
absorption, and the ability to deepen one's concentration in
order to see the universal in a particular object (or even
emotion) belong to an Eastern aesthetic. Barbara Bucknall

notes:

The theme of the supreme importance of intro-
spection is stated in an even clearer and more
striking way in ”Le Temps retrouve", where the
narrator decides to forsake the world and de-
vote himself to the task of writing a book
[Could this be a foreshadowing of Malone?]

. In this, his attitude might conceivably
be compared to that of a merciful Bodhissattva
who, although he has attained enlightenment
and is free to pass on into nirvana, chooses
out of compassion to delay his escape from the
bonds of existence, in order to help other 16
beings to the 'further shore' of enlightenment.

112

The Proustian break with objective reality and natural
phenomena, as used by the Romantics and Symbolists, leads

to creative (typically Buddhist) explorations of the Self:

The only fertile research is excavatory, immersive,

a contraction of the spirit, a descent. The artist

is active, but negatively, shrinking from the nullity

of extracircumferential phenomena, drawn in to the

core of the eddy. (3, pp. 65-66)
Both Beckett and Proust call this "descent"--"Involuntary
Memory"; its make up is quite similar to the "instantaneous
awakening . . . or liberation from time"17 emphasized by the
Zen artist. Beckett's works, with this particularly Buddhist
type of perception. come to grips with 'reality' through
experiencing the creative force with a spirit free from the
restrictions of prescribed narrative and causality. Beckett

describes a new artistic vantage point with the following

lines from Proust:

When the object is perceived as . . . unique . . .,
when it appears independent of any general notion
and detached from the sanity of a cause, isolated
and inexplicable in the light of ignorance, then
and then only may it be a source of enchantment.

Western logic, rationality and objectivity give way
to a Zen Buddhist viewpoint-~a viewpoint of mystic detachment
rather than accumulative knowledge. Beckett quotes Proust:
"Man is not a building that can receive additions to its

superficies, but a tree whose stem and leafage are an expression

of inward sap" (p. 66). And he adds in his own words:

113

"Here as always, Proust is completely detached from all moral
considerations. There is no right and wrong in Proust nor
in his world." (p. 66)
With Proust's and Beckett's art the creator becomes
a Buddha-like mystic whose universal message lies in the
Nirvanic rather than the tragic vision. That is, the reality
of meditative, 'vacant' states in which, for example, a beam
of sunlight, a blade of grass, or a madeleine can acquire
profound artistic dimensions replaces the rants and raves of
a struggling King Lear or conniving Hedda Gabler. Like
Proust's narrator, the modern artist probes a new aesthetic
landscape where contingency, reason and logic are no longer
solely responsible for what is written. "Proust's characters
and themes, although they seem to obey an almost insane inward
necessity, are presented and developed with a fine contempt
for the vulgarity of a plausible concatenation." (Pp. 81-82)
Beckett saw that Proust, like the Zen artist, attempts
to convey a spiritual essence that Western artists with their
correspondences, analogies, metaphors and narrative techniques
often lose sight of. To express the purely subjective, writers
such as Beckett and Proust rely on stylistic means that approach
the unstructured processes of the mind rather than on plotlines
which merely please the Occidental reader's attraction toward
organization and rational explanation. In giving up established
Western artistic methods, the modern writer develops his own

peculiarly subjective ones. Beckett explains in Proust:

114

. . . the only world that has reality and signifi-

cance is the world of our own latent consciousness

. . . the will, being utilitarian, a servant of

intelligence and habit, is not a condition of the

artistic experience. (p. 13)
In short, the "artistic experience" becomes an almost mystical
one. To repeat, "Proust has adopted the mystic experience as
the Leitmotiv of his composition" and thus one finds a 'medi-
tative' literature that no longer measures itself in terms of
plot structure or even logic. The writings of Proust and
Beckett are not built but "excavatedz"

the work of art is discovered, uncovered . . .

pre-existing with the artist, a law of nature.

The only reality is provided by the hierogly-

phics traced by inspired perception. (p. 84)

It is no wonder that Beckett finds comparisons to

such a literature in the most abstract of arts--music. "Music
is the catalytic element in the work of Proust" (p. 92).
Proust, like the musician, is true to the 'real' in art for
he does not distort with rational definitions, logical inter-
relations, and causality. In the following quote from Proust,
Beckett's reference to Schopenhauer is appropriate since the
German philosopher was himself drawn to Zen Buddhism.

Schopenhauer rejects the Leibnitzian view of music

as 'occult arithmetic', and in his aesthetics se-

parates it from the other arts, which can only

produce the Idea with its concomitant phenomena

whereas music is the Idea itself, unaware of the
world of phenomena . . . and untouched by the

115

teleologicel hypothesis . . . This essential quality
of music is distorted by the listener who being an
impure subject, insists on giving a figure to that
which is ideal and invisible, on incarnating the
ideal and invisible, on incarnating the Idea in what
he conceives to be an appropriate paradigm. (pp. 91-

92)
At one point Beckett even quotes Proust describing "the re-
current mystical experience” as "'a purely musical impression,
non-extensive, entirely original, irreducible to any other
order of impression . . . sine materia'" (p. 93).

It should be noted that Beckett's periodic references
to Arthur Schopenhauer (even without the context of music) is
indicative of Proust's as well as his own ties to Eastern
thought. "In Schopenhauer” writes Barbara Bucknall, "Proust
may very well have found an abundance of Hindu-Buddhist
ideas--quite enough to account for his treatment of the
themes of enlightenment . . . reincarnation, appearance, and
relation.”18 The German philosopher's preoccupation with
spiritual, Nirvanic states is quickly picked up by Beckett
in his analysis of Proust's art and may account for his own

anti-intellectual ideas concerning the creative process:

And we are reminded of Schopenhauer's definition
of the artistic procedure as 'the contemplation
of the world independently of the principle of
reason.‘ . . . his explanations are experimental
and not demonstrative. He explains them in order
that they may appear as they are-inexplicable.

He explains them away. (p. 87)

A Zen Buddhist realizes the above concept with the following

quote regarding the source of inspiration: "You cannot get

116

it by taking thought;/ You cannot seek it by not taking

thought."19

The supreme lack of motive, purpose, or ego in
the Zen artist's method of creation was definitely understood
by Schopenhauer and transmitted to Proust and Beckett. In

The World as Will and Idea Schopenhauer states:

 

In India our religions will never take rest. The

ancient wisdom of the human race will never be

displaced by what happened in Galilee. On the con-

trary, Indian philosophy streams back to Europe, and

will produce a fundamental change in our rationalistic

knowledge and thought.
This change is surely seen in Beckett's analysis of Proust's
literature where "the many concessions required of the literary
artist by the shortcomings of the literary convention" (p. 11)
are displaced. It is no wonder that "Proust's style was
generally resented in French literary Circles" (p. 87) for he
adopted certain Oriental ideals and notions which must have
seemed most strange to them. The principle of Samsura pro-
vides a case in point.

Samsura or reincarnation, as explained in the previous
chapter, is seen in ”Proust's awareness of changes in person-
ality . . . based on the feeling that we have many selves."21
Consequently, in Beckett's study of Proust he finds that
cycles, rebirths, and changes are the true substance of life
and literature--"the mortal microcosm cannot forgive the
relative immortality of the macrocosm" (p. 21). In coming

to this proposition Beckett is affected not only by Proust's

but also Schopenhauer's aesthetics:

117

. . . life is a succession of habits, since the
individual is a succession of individuals, the
world being a projection of the individual's con-
sciousness (an objectivation of the individual's
will, Schopenhauer would say), the pact must be
continually renewed, the letter of safe conduct
brought up to date. The creation of the world
did not take place once and for all time, but
takes place every day. (p. 19)

Beckett's characters, as has been shown, cannot deliver them-
selves from the past. (In fact, they cannot even disassociate
themselves from characters in previous books!) Thus, the

essence of Samsura can be seen as early as Proust, where

Beckett concludes:

At best, all that is realised in Time (all Time
produce) whether in Art or Life, can only be
possessed successfully by a series of partial
annexations--and never integrally and at once.

(pp. 17-18)
Proust, in acknowledging the 'wheel of life' known
as Samsura, came to grips with a consciousness which could
never be bound by the Western cosmology based on Christianity.

According to Robert Zaehner in Mysticism, Sacred and Profane:

 

An Inquiry into Some Varieties of Praeturnatural Experience,

 

"Proust seems to have had a natural mystical experience of a

Buddhist type, in that he experienced within himself two

22 Beckett refers to these levels

levels of consciousness."
as "Habit" and "Time": the former being "the gross manifesta-
tion of an imposed reality or Super-ego" ( p. 23); the latter
found in "the world of our own latent consciousness."23

Whereas Habit is responsible for man's cycle of rebirths in

118

Samsura, Time-—in Beckett's and the Buddhist's conception of
it--can lead to Nirvana. In Proust: "Unfortunately Habit

has laid its veto in this [Nirvanic] form of perception, its
action being precisely to hide the essence--the Idea--of the
object in the haze of conception-preconception" (p. 23).

If man realized the Buddhist "essence" of Time (which goes
beyond mere chronology and makes no distinction between past
and present) Habit would no longer be "the ballast that chains
the dog to his vomit" (g, p. 19) or the cause of his bondage
to an "endless cycle of rebirths." Beckett writes of the

Eastern denotation of Time in Proust:

The identification of immediate with past experience,
the recurrence of past action or reaction in the pre-
sent, amounts to a participation between the ideal
and the real, imagination and direct apprehension,
symbol and substance. Such participation frees the
essential reality . . . What is common to present and
past is more essential than either taken separately.

(p. 74)
With such a perspective Proust would devote pages to the play
of light in a room or the arrangement of tea leaves in a cup;
his narrator's ”essential reality" is not hampered by Habit.
A Zen poem acknowledges the mystic truth of this perspective:

The morning glory which blooms for an hour

Differs not at heart from the giant pine

Which lives for a thousand years.

Established orders and conventional values no longer

reign supreme in the Proustian "stasis.” Though Beckett is

119

writing Specifically about the death of Habit in Proust's
creation, he can also be viewed as speaking for a new genera-
tion of writers who saw as much meaning in the "morning
glory" as in the "giant pine":

The old ego dies hard. Such as it was, a minister

of dullness, it was also an agent of security. When

it ceases to perform that second function, when it is

opposed by a phenomenon that it cannot reduce to the

condition of a comfortable and familiar concept, when,

in a word, it betrays its trust as a screen to spare

its victim the spectacle of reality, it disappears,

and the victim, now an ex-victim, for a moment free,

is exposed to the real. (p. 21)
Robert Zaehner stresses in his application of Buddhist prin-
ciples to Marcel Proust that union with the formidable reality
of Eastern Time leads to a "deeper underlying self, existing
outside the categories of space and time and quite different
from what we call the ego."25 He goes on to say:

Proust's entire novel [Remembrance of Things Past]

may be understood as conveying a Buddhist message--

that of the transience and instability of everything

in our daily lives and the futility of attaching our-

selves 28 these transient, corrupt, and unstable

things.
In twentieth century literature the embryonic Self becomes
the artist's focal point and the shell of objectivity and
Habit invariably disintegrates. As Beckett puts it in

Proust: "The aspirations of yesterday were valid for yes-

terday's ego, not for today's." (p. 13)

120

Proust once said:

Only through art can we get outside of ourselves and

know another's view of the universe which is not the

same as ours and see landscapes which would other-

wise have remained unknown to us like the landscapes

on the moon.
Through Schopenhauer and certainly through Proust, Beckett
came into contact with a universe or landscape that had been
_ignored for too long by Western artists. He learned from the
French novelists' aesthetic ideals that the mystic East could

break through the structures and conventions that held

Occidental literature in check. Proust believed that

The great quality of true art is that it redis-

covers, grasps, and reveals to us that reality

far from which we live, from which we get farther

and farther away as the conventional knowledge we

substitute for it becomes thicker and more imper-

meable . . . (Proust, p. 191)
Critics such as Robert Zaehner and Barbara Bucknall feel that
with the "landscape" of Oriental beliefs and artistic tech-
niques Proust's canon can be rediscovered with highly relevant
insights. For French critic George Cattaui "Proust resembles
some oriental sage or Sufi poet as much as a mystic of the
Christian sort"28; and Marguerite Yourcenar "identifies as
Buddhist Proust's awareness of the passage of time, the frag-
mentation of external personality, and the vanity of desire."29
An analysis of Samuel Beckett's works after Proust reveals

that the Eastern outlook of the French writer certainly be-

came his own.

121

Though not speaking of literature, the following
maxim by Proust is nonetheless connotative of the modern
writer's realization that the rationality and logic of the
West cannot be barricaded from the inroads of Eastern

spirituality:

When a piece of sculpture or a musical composition
produces an emotion that one feels to be higher,
purer, truer than ordinary life, such a wogk must
correspond to a certain spiritual reality. 0

For Beckett, Proust's work conveyed a "spiritual reality"

of Buddhist overtones. Though Beckett does not relate
specific Zen principles by name in Proust, there is, through-
out the monograph, a definite belief that mysticism contains

a vibrant realm all too Often overlooked by the Western artist.

For Beckett, art becomes less an act of conscious will than a

product of the mystic's ”Involuntary Memory":

The point of departure of the Proustian exposition

is not the crystalline agglomeration but its kernel--
the crystallised. The most trivial experience--he
says is encrusted with elements that logically are

not related to it and have consequently been rejected
by our intelligence: it is imprisoned in a vase fill-
ed with a certain perfume and a certain colour and
raised to a certain temperature. These vases are sus-
pended along the height of our years, and, not being
accessible to our intelligent memory, are in a sense
immune to rationalization. (p. 73)

Samuel Beckett's literary canon, like Proust's novels
and the Buddha's teachings, conveys the seemingly paradoxical

themes of man's need for spiritual enlightenment and his self-

imposed isolation within the material world. Like Proust's

122

narrator and the Buddha, Beckett strives to attain philo-
sophical detachment in order to find a Universal Reality or
Cosmic Self buried beneath Habit. This striving is not
Eastern in itself, but it results in works that come closer
than any other Western writer's to the intangible, mystic
concepts of Zen Buddhism. True Enlightenment, according to
the Buddha, comes "Against the stream of common thought/

."31 Proust's narrator,

Deep, subtle, difficult, delicate .
writes Beckett, also sees that the "ideal and immaterial
statement of the essence" and "a unique world . . . expressed
timidly, as a prayer . . . as an inspiration." (3, p. 93)
Such is the territory of the "invisible reality . . . that
damns the life of the body on earth as a pensum" (g, p. 93).
In her introduction to The Religion of Art in Proust, Barbara
Bucknall feels that this "invisible reality,” which entranced

Beckett early in his career, cannot be studied in Western

terms alone:

. . . we will consider how Proust develops, in spite
of his use of Christian language, an attitude which
is more akin to oriental mysticism than to any other
form of religious belief . . . At the root of "Le
Temps retrouve" is an act of faith in the belief

that spirit must triumph over matter and lead to the
integration of the personality: an ingegration which
in turn leads to creative achievement.

In studying Proust, Beckett also became engrossed in the Orien-

tal spirit.

The haiku quality of Samuel Beckett's shorter poems

shows the undeniable influence of Eastern philosophy as well

123

as Zen artistic techniques. The thirteen poems in Echo's
hehee (1935) reveal three basic Oriental attributes: disgust
with the suffering and meaninglessness of human existence;
the realization of a Nirvanic state in which spiritual re-
spite can be found; and the structural, stylistic elements
of imagery abounding in simple contrasts mixed with kernels
of Zen wisdom.

The Buddhist belief that life is suffering is repeated

time and time again in Echo's Bones; the first poem entitled

 

”The Vulture" morbidly dwells on this notion with haiku
simplicity:

dragging his hunger through the sky
of my skull shell of sky and earth

stooping to the prone who must
soon take up their life and walk

mocked by a tissue that may not serge

till hunger earth and sky be offal.
The Vulture's craving for spiritual nourishment in the void
never abates during the circular progress of the poem. The
self-enclosed structure of ”The Vulture" (beginning and ending
with "hunger" set amidst "earth" and ”Sky") with its spiraling
progress (reminiscent of the bird's flight in search of prey)
has definite Buddhist overtones. Christmas Humphrey in

Buddhism explains:

The process of becoming is a circle; the process of
becoming more, of growth, is a spiral, either up or
down according as the growth is towards or away from
wholeness.

124

On a more thematic level the poem seems to represent.
man's ignominious existence which will never cease unless
the spiritual replaces the gnawing hunger of the flesh or
"tissue." Like the scavenger vulture, man seeks to preserve
his earthly existence as long as possible (feeding on the
material rather than spiritual), even though suffering follows
him all his days. Such a philosophy is typically Buddhist
as illustrated by the Zen maxim: "To save life it must be
destroyed/ When utterly destroyed, one dwells for the first
time in peace."35

The two "Enueg" poems which follow "The Vulture" are
much too long to be considered in haiku structural terms,
yet their striking contrasts and extremely moving images are
exemplative of Japanese poetry's continual movement between
the physical and spiritual worlds. In essence, meaning often
comes through paradox. "The haiku poet [who] moves us by
presenting rather than describing objects . . . by presenting
particulars in which the emotional powers of the things or

36

scenes reside." The following imagery of the pitiful hens

and the creeping vegetation must be seen separately and then

together in order to derive meaning from ”Enueg 1":

Next:

a lamentable family of grey verminous hens,

perishing out in the sunk field,

trembling, half asleep, against the closed
door of a shed,

125

with no means of roosting.

The great mushy toadstool,

green-black,

oozing up after me,

soaking up the tattered sky like an ink of
pestilence,

in my skull the wind going fetid,

the water . . . (p. 24, 11. 8-18)

The "hens" and pestilential content of the "skull” portray
humanity's struggling, miserable lot with the fierce imagis-
tic precision that makes haiku an experience in itself. In
The Japanese Haiku, Kenneth Yasuda describes the haiku poet's

method and in doing so brings Beckett's short pieces in

Echo's Bones more clearly into critical focus:

He renders in a few epithets what he experiences,
so that imagination will fill these spaces with

all the details in which the experimental value

of the images reside. He does not give us meaning;
he gives us the concrete objects which have mean-
ing . . . When we read such a poem, how true it is
that the "meanest flower can gig; thoughts/ That

do oft lie too deep for tears."

In "Enueg I" Christ's crucifixion is not merely
described; it is creatively hammered out with concrete objects
that attest to the actual experience. Man's worldly pain and
distress, seen by the Buddha as inevitable, are given a reality
that goes beyond the Westerner's search for poetic 'effects'.
Actual feelings and emotions become part, as Yasuda puts it,
"of immediate perception without conscious effort or reason-
ing. Intuition is immediate, as the perception of color

is immediate":38

126

sweating like Judas

tired of dying

tired of policemen

feet in marmalade

perspiring profusely

heart in marmalade

smoke more fruit

the old heart the old heart

breaking outside congress. (p. 26, 11. 12-20)

Beckett's acknowledgement of suffering is indicative
of his view that death is mankind's undeniable heritage from
the womb. Such an emphasis not only gives his poems stylis-

tic intensity but also a Zen Buddhist philosophic tone. In

Essence of Buddhism Daisetz Suzuki says:

 

The value of human life lies in the fact of suffering,
for where there is no suffering, no consciousness of
Karmic bondage, there will be no power of attaining
spiritual experience and thereby reaching the field
of non-distinction. Unless we agree to suffer we
cannot be free from suffering.3

How exceptionally powerful and real this philosophy becomes

is illustrated in Echo's Bones. For instance, in "Enueg I"

 

suffering, bondage, and despair take on specific intensity:

Blotches of doomed yellow in the pit of
the Liffey;

the fingers of the ladders hooked over
the parapet,

soliciting;

a slush of vigilant gulls in the grey
spew of the sewer.

Ah the banner

the banner of meat bleeding

on the silk of the seas and the arctic
flowers

that do not exist. (p. 25, 11. 3-10)

127

The juxtaposition of "yellow in the pit" and the "meat bleeding
on the silk" are certainly part of haiku's role of presenting
"apparently warring elements of experience" with an impact

that heightens the poem's resolution. Yasuda writes:

Whatever conflict or disharmony there is has preceded
the haiku moment, in which the nature of things is
grasped in clear intuition. The world, in the haiku
moment, stands revealed for what it is. We are filled
with "Ah-ness," with a sense that indeed, this is She
way it truly is, with the perfection of finality.4
In the following lines of "Enueg I" the contrast of the green
landscape with the brutal mood of the verbs--"skewered,"
"strangled," "bites"--leads to a final comment on the nature
of man's thoughts when dispossessed of his underlying spiri-
tuality:
Above the mansions the algum-trees
the mountains
my skull sullenly
clot of anger
skewered aloft strangled in the cang of

the wind
bites like a dog against its chastisement.

(p. 22, 11. 10-15)
This at times jarring juxtaposition leads to symmetry and
even harmony when seen in haiku's aesthetic method.
Interestingly enough, Beckett is not content in just
contrasting certain images within a particular poem; he is a
master of setting whole themes side by side and creating a
whole. For example, in the poem "Alba," which directly follows

the_"Enueg" poems, the desolate view of life's painful earthly

128

heritage is intermingled with a brief but intense glimpse of
a spiritual haven. The graceful, Oriental connotations of

the lines sandwiched between the "branded moon" of the first
stanza and the "dust . . . bulk dead" of the last, indicates

that there is another reality besides the one of worldly

torment.

. . . the branded moon

beyond the white plane of music

that you shall establish here before
morning

grave suave singing silk

stoop to the black firmament of areca

rain on the bamboos flower of smoke
alley of willows

who though you stoop with fingers of
compassion

to endorse the dust . . .

a statement of itself drawn across the
tempest of emblems

so that there is no sun and no unveiling

and no host

only I and then the sheet

and bulk dead (p. 28, 11. 3-17)

The elegant, calm imagery of the middle stanza lends a phan-
tastical element to the poem that is certainly not at odds
with Zen's belief in the serene "condition of Nirvana: a

state of non-being where the will has vanished and knowledge

41

only is left." Two haiku poems allude to this same

"philosophic-vegetative" stasis where peace reigns supreme

over nature's mystic beauty: "In the twilight gloom/ Of the

42

redwood and the pine/ Some wisteria bloom" and "Underneath

the eaves/ A blooming large hydrangea/ Overbrims its leaves."43

129

The "timeless moments" of certain poems in Echo's
Bones seem to underly Beckett's almost Zen belief in the

"Plenum-Void" of Nirvana. Seki Osuga, in his Collected

 

Essays on Haiku Theery, writes:

A Nirvana-like sense will be expressed by the organ-
ization of and placement in order of appropriate
objects, in such a way as to create the same sense
of harmony ai4when, at a glance, we experience them
intuitively.

In "Sanies I" a "Nirvana-like sense" lies at the heart of

the poem with its peace and quiet fulfillment:

good as gold now in the prime after a
brief prodigality
yea and suave
suave urbane beyond good and evil
biding my time without rancour (p. 31, 11. 15-18)

And in "Serena I" (whose title bears witness to the Oriental
mystical state) the "fly" takes on special Nirvanic signifi-

cance in its moment of "light":

my brother the fly

the common housefly

sidling out of darkness into light

fastens on his place in the sun

whets his six legs

reVels in his planes his poisers

it is the autumn of his life (p. 37, 11. 1-7)

The "fly" takes another form in the following haiku poem by
Basho, yet the Zen attainment of serenity is just as quietly
achieved: "Soundlessly/ Eating the rice-plant,--/ The

"45

caterpillar. The "fly" and the "caterpillar" remain

uniquely themselves, but in their brief "timeless moments"

130

they illustrate Osuga's aesthetic principle: "The joy of
haiku lies precisely in the point that the writer's feelings
have been objectified and not that a condensed picture of
nature has been shown."46
It must be realized, of course, that the poems in
Echo's Bones and even the ones in Qeatre Poemes (written
much later) are too long to be considered haiku in the strict-
est sense, yet they do reveal a Zen simplicity and austerity
that is essential to Oriental art in general. Haiku is an
ascetic art, yet there is nothing precious or affected about
it. In Qpatre Poemes, "poem 2" contains a mystic "peace"
that is subtle and universal at the same time. Such attri-

butes belong to haiku with its minimum of description and

action:

my peace is there in the receding
mist

when I may cease from treading these
long shifting thresholds

and live the space of a door

that opens and shuts (p. 57, 11. 6-9)

Beckett's contemplative emotion becomes at one with the
mysterious space or void that, ultimately, can never be

captured. Kenneth Yasuda might just as well be describing

"poem 2" in his analysis of haiku's "thought moment"

The nature of a haiku moment is anti-temporal
and its quality is eternal, for in this state
man and his environment are one unified whole,
in which there is no sense of time.

 

131

"Poem 4" combines the narrator's loneliness and despair with

the "rain" in just such a unified whole:

I would like my love to die
and the rain to be falling on the
graveyard .
and on me walking the streets
mourning the first and last to love me (p. 61,
11. 1-4)

This concise ascetic imagery mixed with poignant sorrow belong
to a specific aspect of haiku called heeee which captures

"the echo of what has passed and what was loved .'. . the
moment of crisis between seeing the transience of the world
with sorrow and regret, and seeing it in the very form of

the great Void."48

This "Void" gives Aware its Zen Buddhist
character; Beckett uses this particular haiku form to per-

fection in "poem 3" of Quatre Poemes:

 

peering out of my deadlight looking
for another
wandering like me eddying far from all
the living
in a convulsive space
among the voices voiceless
that throng my hiddeness. (p. 59, 11. 11-15)

In the following two Zen poems, haiku's coupling of a tem-
poral image (exs. "the path of a bird” and "white clouds")
with the "vast inane" is subtly evocative of Beckett's "space/

among the voices voiceless":

In the vast inane there is no back or front
The path of the bird annihilates East and
West.49

132

Ever onwards to where the waters have an
end,
Waiting motionless for when the white clouds
shall arise.
The lyric essence of Nirvana within the Aware mode is similarly

conveyed in another section of "poem 3":

what would I do without this world face-
less incurious
where to be lasts but an instant where every
instant
spills in the void the ignorance of having
been
without this wave where in the end
body and shadow together are engulfed
what would I do without this silence where
the murmurs die
the pantings the frenzies toward succour
towards love (p. 59, 11. 1-7)
Surely the void of which Beckett speaks cannot be dealt with
in traditional Western lyric forms. Like the state of Nirvana,
the most expressive haiku are not philosophical or pedantic,
but refined to a point where everything is said in a minimum
number of words and in a contemplative tone.

In the poem "Echo's Bones" (the last of the thirteen
poems) the cessation of mortal passion and activity gives
way to reflections or "echoes" that are certainly Eastern in
their nuances. The peace of the grave is definitely not a
new theme to Western poetry, yet Samuel Beckett's handling
of it contains Buddhist aspects that are well worth mention-

ing. "Echo's Bones” is merely five lines:

133

asylum under my tread all this day

their muffled revels as the flesh falls

breaking without fear or favour wind

the gantelope of sense and nonsense run

taken by the maggots for what they are (p. 46, 11. 1-5)
Death in "Echo's Bones" is seen as a release--an "asylum"--
that holds answers that are beyond "sense," logic, and reaSon.

In his introduction to To Walk in Seasons, W. H. Cohen writes:

the haiku poet tends to see man as simply

one more element in nature with no inherent
superiority or elevation above any other

part . . . to have mosquitoes comment on oge's
spiritual attainment is quite a situation.

Just such a situation arises in Oemaru's haiku--"I sit like
Buddha/ but the mosquitoes don't recognize/ my Nirvana."52
The "maggots" in "Echo's Bones" serve egg to lower man's value
after death, but to elevate his true existence to a level in
which he becomes spiritually receptive. In the grave the
body goes its fleeting temporal way, but the spirit rever-
berates beneath the poet's feet; its echoes are reassuring.
Beckett's attraction to the haiku form and Zen
Buddhist doctrines, in particular, is seen early in his
career with the 98 line poem "Whoroscope" (1930). Like much
of his early works, it is a parody of academic knowledge
colored with a regret for the West's loss of spiritualism.

"Whoroscope," an impenetrable poem without the aid of Adrien

Baillet's 1691 Life of Descartes, shows the decadence of

 

Occidental materialism and intellectualism through its

134

esoteric style and organization. A short excerpt is suffi-

cient in giving Beckett's fast-paced, unprecedented tone:

A wind of evil flung my despair of ease
against the sharp spires of the one
lady:
not once or twice but . .
(Kip of Christ hatch it!)
in one sun's drowning
(Jesuitasters please copy)
so on with the silk hose over the
knitted, and the morbid leather--
what am I saying! the gentle canvas--
and away to Ancona on the bright Adriatic,
and farewell for a space to the yellow key
of the Rosicrutians (p. 13, 11. 44-55)

Light is shed on such a passage by Beckett's numerous foot-
notes (in the above lines the narrator, Descartes, is describ-
ing a vision which he saw before his pilgrimmage to Loretto).

The fact that Beckett uses notes, like T. S. Eliot in The

Waste Land, seems to be a deliberate slap in the face to

 

traditons of lyric poetry which have been used for centuries

in the West. Louis Untermeyer writes in American Poetry

 

Since 1900: ”it is doubtful whether The Waste Land is any-

 

 

thing but . . . a piece of literary carpentry, scholarly
joiner's work; the flotsom and jetsom of desiccated culture

. . . a pompous parade of erudition."5:5

Beckett would prob-
ably not mind such criticism since he strives to achieve just
such an effect in order to point out how alien poetry has
become to modern civilization--alien to a culture caught in

the cogs of science, industrialism, and all-powerful materia-

lism. Cartesean thought is the point from which Beckett's

13S

nausea with Western ideology (and his grapplings With Eastern
mysticism) begins. The fantastic ordering of minute details
in the poem (the Irish brothers Boot who refuted Aristotle

in 1640; Queen Christina's ordering of Descartes to wake at
five o'clock in the morning to begin her lessons; the French

philosopher's referral of easier problems in analytical

 

geometry to his valet; etc.) as well as the multudinous
possibilities, alternate hypotheses, and trivial doubts of

the narrator are given such overstated emphasis that empiricism

 

seems to become a veritable garbage pail of Western academic
'truths'.

Throughout "Whoroscope" ancient and medieval scholars
seem to be intimates of some grotesque joke: "Galileo . . .
vile old Copernican leadswinging son of a sutter" (11. 5-7);
"Oh Harvey beloved (dear bloodswirling Harvey)" (11. 37-39);
"I sat in the hot cupboard throwing Jesuits out of the sky-
light" (1. 26); "Faulhaber, Beeckman and Peter the red . . .
I'll pebble you all your hen-and-a-half ones" (11. 17-19).
Descartes pokes bawdy fun at the learned men of his day and,
in doing so, evokes his own invincible spirit as a zestful
man rather than a dry mathematician.

His suppliant cry, however, at the end of the poem--
"Oh Weulles spare the blood of a Frank/ Who has climbed the
bitter steps/ And grant me my second/ starless inscrutable
hour"(ll. 94-98)--reveals much more than an erring, joking

rogue. Descartes seems to be asking his arch rival "Weulles,

136.

a Peripatetic Dutch physician at the Swedish court, and an
enemy of Descartes" (p. 17)) for somethingbeyond mathematical
formulae, scientific theories, and academic tricks. Descartes
refers to himself with the following enigmatic image and

seems to combine the subtle art of haiku with the NirVanic

notions of Zen--acknowledging his elevated spiritual identity:

I'm . . . the chip of a perfect block that's
neither old nor new,
the lonely petal of a great high bright
rose. (11. 82-83)
The "rose" seems to be the spiritual goal in a world petrified
by materialism.
The "rose," however, is overshadowed in the rest of
”Whoroscope" by the image of the "egg": "What's that? An
egg? . . . it stinks fresh" (11. 1-3); "Two lashed ovaries
with prostisciutto? How long did the womb it?" (11. 13-14);
"In the name of Bacon will you chicken me up that egg" (1. 66);
"I will eat it with a fish fork./ White and yolk and feathers."
(11. 88-89) It is not difficult to discern modern Occidental
man's plight in the embryonic chicken. That is, the Cartesean
philosophy is likened to a shell that ultimately separates
man's spirit from his "starless inscrutable hour" or his "high,
bright [Nirvanic] rose.” Beckett seems to be saying that if
man cannot break this stultifying shell, he will never evolve

to his full, spiritual potential. Living inside the shell of

rationality and materialism, Western man resembles Descartes'

137

daughter Francine: "precious fruit of a house-and-parlour
foetus . . . scourged by a fever to stagnant murky blood."
(11. 31-35) (Such a child anticipates the one in Beckett's
play All That Fall [1957] whose mysterious death makes the
Doctor "exclaim .'. . as if he had had a revelation, [that]
the 'trouble with her was she had never really been born'".54

The narrator of "Whoroscope" might just as well be speaking

of the death stages of Western empiricism with his lines--

Are you ripe at last,

my slim pale double-breasted turd?

How rich she smells

this abortion of a fledgling. (11. 84-87)

Structurally, as well as thematically, "Whoroscope"

contains the conflict between the rational West and mystic
East. Beckett writes about a real, historical personnage
and constantly interrupts his poetry with factural notes,
yet at the same time he uses an illogical, discontinuous,
bawdy style that negates fact as well as time. The philoso-
phic, intellectual condition of Western man is literally
blasphemed by the rowdy narrator who holds unadulterated
reason in the highest contempt. Like T. S. Eliot's The Waste
hehe, "Whoroscope" moves through associations that remind the
reader that art's "precious fruit" has been left high and dry.

by facts, reasons, allusions, and footnotes! Poetry edd[ies]

through that "cracked beater" of Cartesean thought.

138

In The Poetry of T. S. Eliot, D. E. S. Maxwell con-
cludes that The Waste Land "is . . . concerned with the

depicting of a civilization content with grossly debased moral

55

standards." The similarities between The Waste Land and

 

"Whoroscope" are immense if one realizes that both poets are
discontent with existences that no longer find spiritual
satisfaction through Western ideals. Though Gertrude Patter-
son is speaking of Eliot's poem in the following passage,

she might just as well be discussing Beckett's first poetic

work (as well as his novels):

It is the suffering personae of these early poems,
locked in their squalid rooms, who now inhabit an
equally squalid waste land, but who have reached
the point of consciousness where time is motion-
less; people whose sensations are stifled, where
all hope is lost, and whege the springs of effort
and desire are dried up. ,

In presenting such sterile worlds, Beckett and Eliot
find that mysticism and the spiritual world can offer salva-
tion. By stressing the sterility of worlds devoid of faith,
the two poets also emphasize the need for salvation beyond
the rational and logical--beyond Western intellectual,
materialistic antidotes. At the end of Eliot's passage on

the Hyacinth girl, a kind of Nirvana is felt--a phantastical

breeze over the parched landscape of a dying civilization:

I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, 57
Looking into the heart of light, the silence..

139

Similarly Beckett is entranced with the silent, pacific,
Nirvanic "rose" that offers an alternative to the Cartesean
egg. Beckett's images and even his silly puns emphasize the
depths to which civilization and poetry have fallen. For
example, the metaphysical, reflective thoughts of Bacon in
”Whoroscope" are forcefully yoked with the physical sub-
stantiality of the context-~"Bacon and eggs." "The blood of
a Frank” (1. 54) can either be associated with the red, vital
fluid that gives color and spirit to man or the greasy juice
of meat made of scraps. Whatever the association, Beckett
and T. 8. Eliot produce poems that literally dwell upon the
waste land of the West. They see that faith and mystic
beliefs have come to the same fate as Anna Maria (an adver-
sary of Descartes and his theories) at the end of "Whoro-
scope": "she bloomed and withered,/ a pale abusive para-
keet in a mainstreet window." (11. 70-71)

Samuel Beckett's strange vision of a long past era
that still spreads its rationalistic tentacles Onto modern
life is focused through a poem that refuses to give into
Western aesthetics. Its title sums up Beckett's mode of-
creation and also alludes to an Eastern point of view. That
is, the artist looks through a "lens" that refracts Occidental
history with "fallen," 'prostituted' light; and the vain,
excessively egocentric Western view of existence is shattered

into a zodiac of purposely unintelligible, abhorent signs

140

and images; Western man has 'whored' with a philosophy that
finds no place for the "inscrutable . . . lonely petal of a

great high bright rose."

In 1934 Samuel Beckett published ten short stories

under the title of More Pricks Than Kicks. They are of

 

interest to anyone studying Beckett for their protagonist
is the precursor of such characters as Murphy, Watt, Malone,
Vladimir, and Estragon. He reveals particular physical and
emotional characteristics that all Beckettian 'heroes' are
fated to have.

Belacqua Shuah (named after Dante's lazy, slothful

character in Purgatory iv, 97-135) is a foot-loose, phil-

 

osophical,-incorrigibly indolent Dubliner whose scrapes with
the law, husband-hunting females, and drunken cronies provide
picaresque hilarity throughout the ten stories. Yet there

is also an honesty and sensitivity which seeks harmony and
stillness beyond his chaotic, threatening envirOnment.
Belacqua's insistent reflections on death, suffering and
spiritual salvation ultimately place him on a Nirvanic plane:
"His mind might cave in for all he cared . . . he lived in

a Beethoven pause, he said, whatever he meant by that."58
This "Beethoven pause" has its own peculiar stamp of Zen
Buddhist Nirvana. In true Buddhist fashion, Belacqua realizes

that "he must efface himself altogether” (p. 163) and set

his mind on supreme Nihility:

141

When with indifference I remember my past sorrow,

my mind has indifference, my memory has sorrow.

The mind, upon the indifference which is in it,

is indifferent; yet the memory, upon the sorrow

which is in it, is not sad. (p. 81)
Such a philosophy is harmonious with the meditative religions
of the East and gives Belacqua a mystic aura that seems to
be part of all Beckettian anti-heroes.

In essence, suffering, impotence, and death are the
materials from which the comic vision of More Pricks Than
hTehe is derived. A Zen poem summarizes Belacqua's attitude
toward existence: "We eat, excrete, and get up;/ This is
our world./ All we have to do after that--/ Is to die."59

With the first story "Dante and the Lobster," the
Buddhist view of physical life is presented in "a rapid
shorthand of real facts" (p. 10). Belacqua fills his day
with petty errands and adventures--shopping for a lobster,
drinking beer with his drunken friends, taking an Italian
lesson--but throughout it all he has the lurking suspicion
that he "must expect the worst . . . diving into the public."

(p. 13) He senses that his gay facade rides on a whim, a

mere thread that could easily break:

Really a little bit of courtesy and goodwill went

a long way in this world. A smile and a cheerful

word from a common working-man and the face of the
world was brightened. And it was so easy, a mere

question of muscular control. (p. 13)

142

Happiness in the temporal world can be gained through the
spark of a laugh or the frenzy of a busy Dublin street, but
Belacqua is discontented with insignificant encounters and
their resulting chatter. He finds himself looking beyond the
superficialities of routine: "Still he pored over the enigma,
he would not concede himself conquered . . ." (p. 15) At
the end of the story, Belacqua observes his aunt put a live
lobster in boiling water in preparation for dinner and an
analogy to man's fate is made clear:
"Have sense" she said sharply, "lobsters are always
boiled alive. They must be."
In the depths of the sea it had crept into the
cruel pot. For hours, in the midst of its enemies,
it had breathed secretly . . . Now it was going
alive into the scalding water. It had to. Take
into the air my quiet breath.
She lifted the lobster clear of the table. It
had about thirty seconds to live.
Well, thought Belacqua, it's a quick death,
God help us all.
It is not. (p. 22)
The aunt does not see the lobster's message to the living;
she (and Western man in general) live contrary to Belacqua
Shuah's and the Buddhist's realization that only when mor-
tality is apprehended in all its pain and abjection can one
hope to find Nirvanic Enlightenment.
In the next story, "Fingal," Belacqua and his girl
friend Winifred Coates go on a picnic near a mental hospital.
Like Murphy, Belacqua finds the wandering patients much more

attractive than his ladylove. At the end of the story, he

steals a bicycle and peddles madly away from Winnie. Picnics,

143

hikes, love affairs and conventional authority are abhorent
to him and conventional man is equated with "a little fat
overfed boy . . . on the floor with a hammer and a pinking
iron, scalloping the edge of a red cloth" (p. 26).

In a conversation with Winnie, Shuah's ultimate goal
is revealed; his desire to embrace a Universal Reality out-
side of materialism and Western rationalism certainly has

its Nirvanic overtones:

"What ails you?" asked Winnie.

He had allowed himself to get run down, but he
scoffed at the idea of a sequitur from his body
to his mind.

"I must be getting old and tired," he said.
"When I find the nature outside me compensating
for the nature in-side me . . . I want very much
to be back in the caul, on my back in the dark
forever."

"A short ever" she said, "and working day
and night."

The beastly punctilio of women.

"Damn it” he said, "you know what I mean.

No shaving or haggling or cold or hungger-

mugger, no--" he cast about for a term of
ample connotation-- ”No night sweats.” (pp. 29-
30)

The caul-like existence of Belacqua Shuah's literary descen-
dents in the novels is accurately prophesized and so is their
spiritual propensities.

In the same story, the reader learns that "landscapes
were of interest to Belacqua in so far as they furnished
him with a pretext for a long face" (p. 32). In their
travels, Belacqua, Murphy, Watt, Molloy, and Malone resemble

haywire toys that have been wound much to tightly by Cartesean

144

keys. They always appear on the brink of disintegration in
their "last phase of . .5. solipsism"(p. 173).

In the third story, "Ding Dong," Belacqua questions
his secular life and aims at freedom from material inanities.
In doing so he often resembles a lunatic. "The life of the

spirit" says Theodore DeBary in The Buddhist Tradition,

 

"aiming at liberation from the world, replaced the life of
the spirits and man's helpless dependence on nature as the

60 With their

basis of religious thought and practice."
realization of the inconsequentiality of mere physical
existence, Belacqua and his predecessors cease to function
as monstrous Cartesean toys and face a Plenum-Void which

offers an alternative to their rationalized spinning, twist-

ing and turning.

He lived a Beethoven pause, he said, whatever he

meant by that. In his anxiety to explain himself,

he was liable to come to grief . . . a sorry

collapse of a little intermis homo . . . He was

an impossible person in the end. (p. 172)
In other words, Belacqua's "grotesque exterior" is symbolic
of an interior Self which views logic, reason, and semantics
for the shambles they have become and the neurotic anxiety
they produce. Belacqua's belief that "surely resolution has
the right to break down," (p. 172) sprouts from his pro-
gressive disassociation with society and its games.

In "A Wet Night" Belacqua recites a poem at a dinner

party that succinctly sums up his contemplative, deeply intro-

verted nature, a nature that cannot help but run from the

145

possessive embrace of love, the arms of the law, and the
implacable rules of society. Interestingly enough, he
resembles the flower of his poem (a creation strikingly.

reminiscent of Zen imagery):

in the womb of water

an pansy leaps . . .

on the breasts of the water it has closed it

has made

an act of floral presence on the water

the tranquil act of its cycle on the waste

from the sprouting forth

to the re-enwombing (p. 60)
In the wastes of Dublin, Belacqua sallies forth, the first
in the long line of Beckett's "grotesque" misfits.

With the three stories after "A Wet Night" ("Love
and Lethe," "Walking Out,” and "What A Misfortune")
Belacqua's 'amorous' affairs are explored only to show that
he is incapable of love in the Western context. In his
'romances' with Ruby Tough, Lucy, and Thelma bboggs, it is
easy to see why Vladimir and Estragon, as well as Hamm and

Clov, prefer to remain bachelors. According to Khatipalo

Bhikkhu in Buddhism Explained, "sensual love . . . is not

 

only linked to attachment (=greed) but also to aversion and
delusion so that the person who is content with this love,

61 Though Belacqua is beset by

pays a heavy price for it."
passionate young women, he is far from obliging to their
amorous appetites. Ruby Tough's affections drive her to the

verge of suicide in "Love and Lethe," but they are for naught

146

"seeing that Belacqua was scarcely ever aware of [them]"
(p. 85). 'Beckett does everything imaginable to make fun
of their attempt at an idyllic lovers' afternoon in the Coun-
try and refers to them as "the pup and slut," (p. 92) and
lines continuously pop up which ruin the romantic mood: "A
human turd lay within the rath" (p. 93). In "Walking Out"
Belacqua prefers to banish Lucy from his evening constitu-
tional rather than plan for their rapidly impending marriage.
To brush her off, Belacqua says: "I know . . . you don't
believe in these private experiences, women don't I know
as a rule” (p. 101). Overwrought from her rejection, she
meets with a crippling accident.

Belacqua's knowledge is beyond Lucy's ken, but it
is perfectly within certain Buddhist beliefs. Beckett's
lack of important female characters in his prose may well be

explained in the following quote from Essence of Buddhism

 

by Lakshmi Narasu:

Most women are found in experience to be too

scant in wisdom, too deeply immersed in vanity,
and too frail for that renunciation and mastery
of the passions which are demanded of those who

aspire to reach the supreme heights of Nirvana.62

Shuah's continual denial of love and sensulaity is totally

in keeping with Buddhist asceticism. Women are only a reminder
of the "submarine and oppressive"63 way of the flesh, whereas
man, in the state of Nirvana, lives on a plane "staring

vacantly into the shadows, alive to nothing but the weight'

147

d."64 The aim of Buddhist

and darkness and silence of the woo
morality is to kill lust and passion: "The enemy is desire,
for delusion of the mind, the foolish thought that 'self' is

permanent."65

The impurities of the body and mind must be
pushed totally aside if Nirvana is to be attained. Lucy,
"crippled for life and her beauty dreadfully marred," (p. 112)
becomes Belacqua's ideal marriage partner (wedded bliss
being a state of convenience rather than love): "Belacqua
was so happy married to the crippled Lucy that he tended to
be sorry for himself when she died" (p. 114).

In "What A Misfortune," Belacqua is roped into
another marriage; his wedding to Thelma bboggs is more of a

freak show, however, than a holy rite. On Belacqua's side

of the church his sole relatives make quite an appearance:

Jimmy the Duck Skyrm, and aged cretin, outrageious

in pepper and salt, Lavalliere and pull over, gnashing
his teeth without ceasing at invisible spaghetti; and
Hermione Nautzsche, a powerfully built nymphomaniac
panting in black and mauve between shipped crutches.
(p. 141) '

Love, with all its vows, sacraments and ideals is relegated

to the level of a slapstick comedy in More Pricks Than Kicks.

 

Buddhism perceives sensuality and sexual love as necessary
but ultimately blinding forces that rivet man to his Samsura
(cycle of continuous rebirth). At the end of "What A Mis-
fortune," "Belacqua stood like a stock at gaze, with an
overwhelming sense that all this would happen to him again,

in a dream or subsequent existence" (p. 151).

148

In "The Smeraldina's Billet Doux," the last story

to deal with love in More Pricks Than Kicks, Beckett calls

 

the reader's attention to the ridiculousness of romanticism.
The story is simply a love letter written by one of Belacqua's
'sweethearts' yet it provides profound insights not only into
the girl's silly notions of idealized (Western) love, but

also into Belacqua's Buddhist manner of responding. Smeraldina

writes:

I had a very queer dream last night about you and me
in a dark forest, we were lieing together on a path,
when suddenly you changed into a baby and dident know
what love was and I was trying to tell you that I
loved you more than anything on earth but you dident
understand and wouldn't have anything to do with me

. . (p. 153)

Belacqua's longing for the womb-like Nirvanic existence is
certainly complementary to the lady's not-so-strange dream.
Belacqua denies his sexuality and welcomes a spiritual realm
that resembles apathy to observers such as Smeraldina: "Is
everything indifferent to you? Evidently you cant be both-
ered with a goat like me” (p. 153). What she regards as

indifference is explained as something much more by a Buddhist

scholar:

A love without attachment is scarcely conceivable
to many people but such love is much superior to

the former [sensual love]; being without attach-

ment it can become infinite and need n88 be con-

fined to this or that group of beings.

149

Surely Belacqua's indifference is superior to Smeraldina's

wild, hysteric exhortations to her "belovd":

The tears are rolling down my face . . . Oh! Bel

I love you terrible, I want you terrible, I want
your body your soft white body Negelnackt! My
body needs you so terrible, my hands and lips .
and breasts and everything els on me . . . (p. 155)

The impermanence of sexual attraction and carnal knowledge
are seen quite accurately by the Buddhist. Smeraldina's
uncontrollabel urges and passions are in keeping with the
Eastern tradition of seeing women as "imbued with fierce
prowess. There are none whom they love or like so much as
those that have sexual congress with them."67 Nagg and Nell
in Endgame are the ultimate product of attachments based

on Western ideals of romance. It is little wonder that the

result of their union, Hamm, is slowly disintegrating:

Hamm: If I could sleep I might make love. I'd
go into the woods. My eyes would see . . .
the sky, the earth. I'd run, run, they
wouldn't catch me. (Pause) Nature. (Pause)
There's something dripping in my head.
(Pause) A heart, a heart in my head!

Nagg: (Soft) Do you hear him? A heart in his
head! (He chuckles cautiously)

Nell: One musHTt laugh at those things, Nagg.

(P- 18)

 

The Buddhist's unpossessive, spiritual type of love, which
encompasses the Ultimate Reality of Self rather than just a
small material part of it, is what Belacqua finds most

desirable. His 'heart', like Hamm's, melts and is thus

150

incapable of functioning like Smeraldina's. Even as early
as Proust, Beckett had found Western love to be incompatible
with the universal, Nirvanic dimensions he sought in his own

literature and others':

How have we the courage to wish to live, how can we

make a movement to preserve ourselves from death,

in a world where love is provoked by a lie and con-

sists solely in the need of having our sufferings

appeased by whatever being has made us suffer. (p. 59)
The four 'romantic' stories in More Pricks Than Kicks make
it clear that Beckett's anti-hero thinks in a Buddhist manner;
his desire to enter the caul or womb, searching fer a reality
beyond the corporeal, has its Nirvanic overtones.

In the last two stories, Belacqua's death and the
reactions it provokes among his survivors are dealt with.
It is not suprising in light of his Zen-Buddhist leanings
that Belacqua's death should seem as an almost imperceptible
merging into a less confining, cosmic world. In "Yellow"
Belacqua's minor operation results in his demise since the
doctors, in their clinical bunglings, forget to properly
diagnose this strange character whose body becomes less and
less significant as his life progresses. "They had clean
forgotten to ausculate him!" (p. 174)
At the beginning of "Yellow," Belacqua at last finds

his Self. Earthly delights are contemptible to him now:

151

Day break, with its suggestion of a nasty birth, he

could not bear. Down right and all as he was, he

could not bear the sight of this punctilious and

almost, he sometimes felt, superfluous delivery . . .

He would grow tired and say to himself: I am what

I am. That was the end of all his meditations and

endeavors: I am what I am. (p. 172)
In his conception of "I", Belacqua means much more than a
mere physical entity, since he loses the component principles
of ego (selfishness, desire, vanity) and evolves into the
essential Self of the Buddhist, Oneness with the cosmos.
"For in Buddhist eyes" says Daisetz Suzuki, "all life is one.

The woods, the open sky, man, and the humblest insect on the

wall."68 In "Yellow" Belacqua "sacrificed sense of what
was personal and proper to himself . . . This was abnegation
if you like . . . His mind might cave in for all he cared,

he was tired of the old bastardo" (p. 158). He equates his
forthcoming state under the yellow mist of the anesthetic
with a Nirvanic realm: "My sufferings under the anesthetic,
he reflected, will be quite exquisite . . . Yes, his
troubles were nearly over . . . He must efface himself
altogether" (p. 158).

"Draff," the last story, describes Belacqua's funeral
along with Smeraldina's new romance with Hairy, Shuah's best
friend. To be sure, Belacqua has at last found the peace,
unity and reality that he had always searched for. There
are no tears shed on his grave since his wife and friend

(the only people to show up for the services) know that

152

Belacqua has left earthly suffering and meaninglessness
behind. As will be seen in Belacqua's literary reincarna-
tions, the end of mortal existence cannot stop the flow of

a life in its Karma. Says Suzuki:

To mourn for the inevitable dissolution of a tem-

porary garment is foolishness . . . Death is

usually Nothing but a well-earned rest, when the

experience, great or small, of one life is quietly

digested, to appear in later Tgves as faculty,

ability, and innate tendency.
In "Draff" Smeraldina announces to the parson--"he's all
right . . . I know that" (p. 175) and Hairy, on viewing the
body, witnesses the final harmony that Belacqua always Sought
with the spiritual world beyond life's transience: "You
are quieter than humus . . . you will give the bowels of the
earth a queer old lésson in quiet" (p. 179). Hairy, like
the Buddhist, comes to realize that death's cause is not.
disease'but birth: ”In the end he took his leave [from
Shuah's coffin] without kneeling, without a prayer, but
his brain prostrate before this first fact of its experience"
(p. 179). Smeraldina's crude behavior with Hairy and lack
of feeling during the funeral would certainly not have an-
gered Belacqua since his new found world exists beyond the
veil of tears and superficiality of sentiment. During the

funeral service, the West's concept of Heaven is banished

completely when the narrator interjects:

153

Belacqua had often looked forward to meeting the
girls, Lucy especially, hallowed and transfigured
beyond the veil. What a hope! Death had already
cured him of that naivete. (p. 181)

Belacqua Shuah's demise is seen as an event that
requires a sigh of relief rather than tears. Hairy calls
it "automatic dispensation. Strength from on right . . .
the irreducible coefficient of safety" (p. 180). Belacqua's
"calm and wistful" epitaph speaks to the Buddhist who realizes
that an end to temporal suffering and worldly care is no
great matter when compared with the Universal Reality that
even a rose is part of. On Belacqua's stone is written:

"No gardener has died, comma, within rosaceous memory"(p. 189).
The Buddhist is the gardener who grows love and peace besides
plants and flowers. The lotus flower, symbol of the Bud-
dhist's serenity, has all the attributes of being within
"rosaceous memory."

Buddha's following words call forth the immortal
essence of existence, an essence that can never be shattered
by suffering or death. "I, as a samana [ascetic] will live
in this sinful world as the spotless leaf of the lotus,
unsoiled by the mun in which it grows."70 Belacqua, in seeing
the spiritual side of life that approaches cosmic proportions,
lived his life, on the whole, unsullied by material encroach-
ment and carnal desires. He most certainly viewed the world
of time and space with an Eastern point of view. Edmond

Holmes says in The Creed of Buddha--"It is not life that is

 

154

71 In "Draff" the

evil but a foolish cleaving to life."
following line by the parson on his being ditched by Hairy
and Smeraldina, encapsulates Belacqua's belief: ". . . no
more death neither sorrow nor crying neither shall there be

any more" (p. 48).

In conclusion, More Pricks Than Kicks is Samuel

 

Beckett's first fictional prose accomplishment that perceives
modern man's plight in an anti-intellectual, Eastern manner.
Belacqua's hilariously unique way of coming to grips with
his cosmos indicates the twentieth century artist's refusal
to take the traditions of romance, religion, and even logic
seriously. The Inner world of the Self becomes of prime
concern, and social consciousness must take a back Seat.
Shuah is the literary forefather of such characters as Vla-
dimir and Estragon who pierce conventional, bourgeois exis-
tence in search of a more satisfying goal. These characters
see much more of existence than their immediate physical

surroundings. For example, in "Yellow":

But weeping in this charnel-house [the hospital]
would be misconstrued. All the staff, from matron
to lift-boy, would make the mistake of ascribing
his tears, or perhaps better, his tragic demeanor,
not to the follies of humanity at large which of
course covered themselves, but rather to the tumour
the size of a brick that he had on the back of his
neck. (p. 171)

In WaitingFor Godot, Vladimir takes on the "tragic demeanor"

 

of Belacqua and can see that "In an instant all will vanish

155

and we'll be alone once more, in the midst of nothingness"
(p. 51). Belacqua's tears water Samuel Beckett's entire
canon. The West's materialism and rationality break down
completely, and the reader or audience is faced with charac-,

ters who seek a more spiritual existence:

All he could say was that the objects in which he
was used to find recreation and repose lost gradu-
ally their hold upon him, he became insensible to'
them little by little . . . and now he suddenly
found himself sitting paralysed and grieving . . .
good for nothing but to stare at his spoiling
water, and wait for a sign. (p. 171)

Belacqua's predicament is identical with Vladimir and Estra-
gon's. In their staring and waiting all three conform to the
Buddhist principle that Enlightenment cannot be obtained

from external searching but only in patient meditation.

More Pricks Than Kicks, like WaitingFor Godot,

 

offers no answers, but it does show that man, with all his
bunglings and pratfalls, acknowledges a spiritual state of
salvation, even if it is beyond definition. The state of
Nirvana comes closer than any other, however, to parallel
Belacqua's ultimate goal. "Belacqua snatched eagerly at

the issue. Was it to be laughter or tears? It came to the
same thing in the end . . ." (p. 171). In the end, Nothing-
ness obliterates all distinctions and the soul, like the
souls of all Beckettian characters, becomes at one with the ‘
Void. Edmond Holmes comments on Belacqua's aim in life

through his explanation of Nirvana: "The expansion of the

156

Self carries with it the expansion of consciousness; and when
consciousness has become all-embracing, the filter of ignor-
ance has been finally broken and the delusion of self is

dead."72

Whether it be Vladimir or Estragon, Hamm or Clov,
Belacqua or Murphy, Samuel Beckett's characters expand to a
point where they see reality as a bubble or egg that, on
breaking, takes on the cosmic proportions of Nirvana.

"There's no lack of void" (W.F.G., p. 42).

CONCLUSION

In the last part of Beckett's trilogy the Unnamable

wonders:

From the unexceptional order which has prevailed

here up to date may I infer that such will always

be the case? . . . If one day, a change were to

take place, resulting from a principle of disorder

already present, or on its way, what then? (p. 291)
From his earliest poems to his latest plays, Samuel Beckett
has always been concerned with "change." His characters
have never been content to vegetate (though that is what they
often wind up doing) and thus--through writing, talking,
travelling or just meditating--they attempt to find solutions
to metaphysical problems that, ultimately, remain unsolvable.
In Molloy's search for his long lost mother's room or Vla-
dimir and EstragOn's quest for GodOt one finds spiritual
metamorphoses that reflect Beckett's discontent with Western
intellectualism and materialism. Beckett's world, like
Watt's, remains in a constant state of flux because his
abandonment of Occidental literary and philosophic traditions
connotes, for many critics, a "principle of disorder." Yet,

neat conventions and tidy ideals can no longer reckon with

twentieth century man's moral void:

157

158

[Watt] now found himself in the midst of things

which, if they consented to be named, did so

as it were with reluctance. And the state in

which Watt found himself resisted formulation

in a way no state had ever done. (p. 81)
Beckett's canon goes beyond Western beliefs and moves into
a mystic realm that can best be understood through Eastern
religion and aesthetic modes.

From Proust to Play, time and perception have taken
on Zen Buddhist connotations losing all Western values.
History and "Habit" are simply not as important to the Ori-
ental as is the present moment. The Buddhist is enthralled
with a blade of grass or a beam of sunlight but not with
an ancient book or scroll. As he stares out onto the bleak
street, the Unnamable's modified lotus position illustrates

his introspective, meditative Eastern nature. The following

passage from the beginning of The Unnamable signals the

 

start of the weird (at least to the typical Westerner's mind)

incantations which comprise the remainder of the novel:

I have always been sitting here, at this selfsame
spot, my hands on my knees, gazing before me like

a great horn-owl in an aviary. The tears stream
down my cheeks from my unblinking eyes. What

makes me weep so? From time to time. There is
nothing saddening here. Perhaps it is my liquified
brain . . . Nothing has ever changed since I have
been here. But I dare not infer from this that
nothing ever will change. Let us try and see where
these consideration lead. (p. 291)

A character such as this envisions a new literary universe;
he opens a spectrum to the artist and reader containing colors

unseen in the Western context.

159

Starting with his great attraction to Marcel Proust,
Beckett realized that literature could be attuned to mysti-
cism. The enigmatic Malone, sitting immobile on his bed
writing, becomes a Proustian charaCter in the sense that his
art is imbued with Nirvanic contemplation rather than "Posi-
tive relativism" (g, p. 85) (i.e., an intellectual, rational

means of creation):

While waiting I shall tell myself stories, if I

can. They will not be the same kind of stories

as hitherto, that is all. They will be neither

beautiful nor ugly, they will be calm, they will

be almost lifeless, like the teller . . . reason

has not much hold on me, just now. (M.D., p. 180)
The dualistic West may find such a careless artist hopelessly
unfathomable, yet in an Eastern perspectiVe he "is almost
exempt from the impurity of will" (e. p. 87). For Malone,

as for Proust, there is no right or wrong, good or evil:

He deplores his lack of will until he understands

that will, being utilitarian, a servant of intelli-

gence and habit, is not a condition of the artistic

experience. (2. p. 90)
For Malone, thought gives way to intuition and artistic tur-
moil to the Plenum-Void: "But my notes have a curious tendency,
as I realize at last, to annihilate all they purport to
record" (p. 242).

Throughout the poems, novels and plays the characters

(and narrators) attempt to find mystic peace in the midst

of apocalypse. In essence, the image of the void seems to.

160

be Beckett's literary salvation. In all his works this single

 

image gives harmony to even the most outlandish figures and

scenes; Clov states its unifying power:

I love order. It's my dream. A world where all

would be silent and still and each thing in its

last place, under the last dust. (p. 57)
Beckett's chaotic universe of Chaplinesque cripples on
bicycles, inventories of meaningless objects, and love-making
octogenarians is given poetic integrity by the overriding
metaphor of abounding cosmic emptiness. In speaking of a
Proustian character, Beckett acknowledges that "in her
nothingness, there is active, mysterious and invisible a

current . . . an obscure and implacable Goddess" (g. p. 57).

In Waiting For Godot, an Eastern inspired nihility acquires

 

an "active, mysterious” power of extreme intensity: ". . .
in this immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are
waiting for Godot to come” (p. 51). Pozzo's shouts, Lucky's
theological ramblings and Vladimir's interminable arguments
are given an aesthetic framework in the poetry of silence
and void. After each pratfall, vile remark, or kick in the

shin a Nirvanic "Pause” prevails.

 

The "abyssal depths" are also at the core of the
Trilogy and unite the various characters' adventures and
thoughts. The "murmurings," "voices," and "far whispers"

that Molloy hears will reverberate in all the subsequent

novels:

161

I listen and the voice is of a world collapsing

endlessly . . . And I hear it murmur that all

_wilts and yields . . . forever lapsing and crum-

bling away, beneath a sky without memory of

morning or hope of night. (p. 98)
Beckett's barren, gray landscapes and stale, silent rooms
continuously echo such hollow voices. In another passage
from Molloy the images seem to drift toward the quietude of

Nirvana and literally come to a standstill in the darkness

of the Void:

. . that vast yellow light sailing slowly behind

my bars and which little by little the dense walls

devoured, and finally eclipsed. And now its tran-

quil course was written on the walls, a radiance

scored with shadow, then a brief quivering of the

leaves, if they were leaves, then that too went

out. (p. 31)
It is clear that the above prose borders precariously on
poetry and just as obvious that it alludes to a tranquility
stemming from the "vast," "devour[ing]," "dark" properties
of a profound Unknown--one that smacks of Eastern aesthetic
ideals. Interestingly enough, Beckett has no trouble what-

soever giving form to this Unknown; in the following quote

from Malone Dies the waves and eddies of emptiness resound

 

with as much force as the sea:

A kind of air circulates, I must have said so, and
when all goes still I hear it beating against the
walls and being beaten back by them. And then
somewhere in midspace, other waves, other onslaughts,
gather and break, whence I suppose the faint sound
of aerial surf that is my silence. (p. 277)

162

The Unnamable appreciates this lonely poetic territory to

the fullest:

. . . words, they're all I have, and not many of

them, the words fail, the voice fails, so be it,

I know that well, it will be the silence, full of
murmurs, distant cries, the usual silence . . .

(p. 291)
The apocalyptic landscape of Beckett's literature
can be explored most effectively if Eastern aesthetic values _
are applied. The purpose of this thesis lies‘in just such

an application. Asian scholar Alan Watts writes:

The Western mind is dismayed when ordered concep-

tions of the uniVerse break down, and when the

basic behavior of the physical world is found to

be a 'principle of uncertainty} We find such a

world meaningless and inhuman, but familiarity

with Chinese and Japanese art forms might lead

us to an altogether new appreciation of this

world in its living, and finally unavoidable,

reality.1
Beckett's works deal with a world that has lost its moral,
philosophic groundwork and is trapped in spiritual chaos.
Each poem, novel, or play is locked, like Vladimir and
Estragon, in a struggle between words and silence. They
all contain a power play of decaying material subjects
versus a great Unintelligible that has more than its share
of Buddhist affinities. Beckett's tramps and bums live in
worlds that fracture all aspects of logic; reason and

intellect converge on a mystical "rocking chair" or inde-

scribable "Knot." The Buddhist's aim, like that of Hamm

163

or Krapp or Belacqua is to find spiritual immersion in the
Nirvanic Void. "The aimless life" writes Watts, "is the
constant theme of Zen art of every kind, expressing the
artist's own inner state of going nowhere in a timeless

moment."2

AFTERWORD

With an Eastern perspective the works of Samuel
Beckett become more than apocalyptic comments on man's fate.

By applying aspects of Nirvana, Samsura, and other Zen

 

Buddhist beliefs to such characters as Vladimir, Hamm,
Molloy, and Belacqua Shuah one finds a method to their
madness and a consciousness more in tune with Eastern mys-
ticism than Western materialism. They represent a new
breed of literary character whose hope for spiritual salva-
tion has not perished along with the "white-bearded"
Christian God.

' In the sterile, meaninglessly absurd worlds of

Samuel Beckett's recent prose works--Imagination Dead Imagine

 

(1969) and The Lost Ones (l972)--there is, as in the earlier

 

plays and novels, a will that refuses to submit to the most

hopeless of existences. In The Lost Ones bodies roam the

 

niches and crevices of a flattened cylinder "fifty meter
round and eighteen high" struggling to attain an "unthinkable

end"1 where peace may perhape_be found. In essence, it is

 

a kind of mathematical tract where humanoid creatures refuse
to disassociate themselves from some spiritual goal. This

enigmatic goal appears to be the Nirvanic Self that places

164

165

man in harmony with the cosmos; in other words, the climbing,

transitory peeple of The Lost Ones are shadows of contem-—

 

porary man's quest for a viable soul in the midst of the
abyss.

In Imagipation Dead Imagjne two white bodies lay
in foetal positions, surrounded by a white rotunda.’ Man,
reduced to the most simplistic physical state, cannot re-
frain from making his humanity and spiritual hunger subtly
known. A blue eye occasionally blinks, a faint murmuris
periodically heard, and an "infintesimal shudder"z sometimes
breaks the monotony.

These eerie, short pieces may be viewed as blankw
literary convasses conveying no message whatsoever, or they
can be seen in a Zen Buddhist light. "Paradoxical as it
may seem" says Alan Watts, "the purposeful life in Zen has
no content, no point . . . for Zen never spoils the
aesthetic shock by filling in, by explanation, second
thoughts, and intellectual commentary . . . the figure so
integrally related to its empty space gives the feeling of

3 With an appreciation of this "Void"

the Marvelous Void."
Beckett's poems, stories, novels and plays take on a meaning
heretofore unrecognized by literary critics.

In Buddha and Buddhism Maurice Percheron states:

 

We cannot turn away from an Orient that, for millennia,
has been aware of an indomitable spark that exists in
man, a potentiality bound no doubt to a perishable
body, but able t2 withdraw itself from a greedy attach-
ment to the "I".

166

The 'lost ones', along with Watt, the Unnamable, and Estragon,
to name a few, seek a spiritual plane above their apoCalyptic
landscapes. As she sinks lower and lower into the quagmire

of Happy Daye, Winnie suddenly blurts out--"something must

 

happen, in the world, take place, some change."5 And in
Endgame Clov solemnly vows: "I warn you. I'm going to
look at this filth since its an order" (p. 69). Both char-

acters--like their literary cousins in Waitipg For Godot--'

 

hunger for deliverance and salvations. In their obsessive
need to animate a Spirit or revive a God, they parallel the
relatively new mystical goals of a dissatisfied materialis-
tic Occident. The moribund world of Endgame, the barren
setting of Godot, and the quicksand that threatens to engulf

M. in How It Is cannot blight man's urgent need for an

 

incorporeal essence that makes existence somehow meaningful.

At a recent production of Waiting For Godot, I

 

could not dispel the haunting feeling that Vladimir and
Estragon had, in fact, found their Godot. This Incompre-
hensible Being seemed most obvious in the multudinous
"pauses" and "silences" interspersed throughout the drama.
These clownlike characters managed to communicate a message
beyond the seeming emptiness of the apocalypse, beneath the
void of a spiritually vacuous existence. Such a message

is inherently part of Godot's existence and is also part
of Zen Buddhist philosophy. The demoralized West is just

beginning to awaken to such a philosophy:

167

a change of perspective is beginning to appear,
and science, undermining the world of appearances
more each day, bringing us nearer to truths di-
vined and proclaimed by the Buddha . . . If we'
accept atomic physics as true, basing our view
on the evidence of results, it is perfectly
legitimate to accept the idea of vacuity, a

state of unconditionedness outséde phenomenal
perspectives of time and space.

The "idea of vacuity" brings fear to the Westerner attempt-
ing to 'fill up' his days or 'make something' of himself,
yet in Beckett's cosmos an attraction toward the Ultimate
Reality of being "alone against the silence and . . . the

stillness" (p. 69) is definitely felt. In his short prose

piece From An Abandoned Work (1957), Beckett's narrator sums

 

up the vacuous existence he invariably seeks:

Then it will not be as new, day after day, out, on,
round, back in, like leaves turning, or torn out
and thrown crumpled away, but a long unbroken time
without before or after, light or dark, from or
towards or at, the old half knowledge of when and
where gone, and of what . . . there was never any-
thing, never can be, life and death all nothing,
that kind of thing .

With the expectation of "that kind of thing" the Beckettian
bums become part of a Buddhist philosophy.

The following quotation from Robert Sohl's Instant

Zen deals with the dilemma facing Western man and his art:

Men know how to read printed books; they do not
know how to read unprinted ones. They can play
on a stringed harp, but not on a stringless one.
Applying themselves to the superficial instead
of the profound, how should they understand
music or poetry.

168

Samuel Beckett's creations deal with a spiritual existence
that must be faced in the Occident as it has in the Orient.
Buddhism, aware of a cosmic unity above and beyond the

dogmas and structures of Judeo-Christianity, realizes the
transience of temporal life and the sordidness of materialism.
It is a faith that comes to terms with what Hamm calls "me-
ments for nothingness." Without false hopes or easy answers,
Beckett's canon delves into life and art with the express
purpose of coming to grips with the Void. Anechtes, phil-
osophic digressions, and absurd 'stories' inevitabley give
way to the somehow comforting realization, at least in the
Oriental religious context, that Nothingness does not neces-
sarily connot negativity. Godot's reality lies between the
Ilines as does the rhythm of Samuel Beckett's almost silent
poetry. The "convulsive space/ among the voices voiceless"9

is the new frontier of Western literature.

NOTES

169

NOTES

CHAPTER I

1D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover (New York:
Grove Press, 1959), p. l.

2The Oxford Annotated Bible, ed. Herbery G. May
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 823.

 

 

 

3Ibid., p. 823.

4Jean Genet, Letters to Roger Blin (New York: Grove
Press, 1959), p. 31.

 

5Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul (New York:
Harcourt Brace and World, 1933), p. 234.

6Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West (New York:
A. A. Knopf, 1926-28), p. 737.

7William Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study of Exis-
tential Man (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1958), p. 75.

 

 

 

 

8Robert Sohl, The Gospel According to Zen (New York:
New American Library, 1970): p. 27.

9Alan W. Watts, The Way of Zen (New York: Random
House, 1957), p. 174.

10Yukio Yashiro, 2000 Years of Japanese Art (New
York: H. N. Abrams, 1958), p. 28.

11Walter G. Langlois, Andre Malraux: The Indochina
Adventure (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1966), p. vii.
"Malraux's two year sojourn in Indochina (1923-24) was a
critical time for him, as a man and as a writer. The youth
who had been known in France as the author of literary fan-
tasies returned from the Far East a deeply committed social
reformer. His first three novels, his various speeches,
and newspaper articles, and his feverish political activity
in the 1930's are eloquent indications of how deeply he had
been marked by his colonial adventures. Although it is
nearly impossible to reach a full understanding of Malraux.

 

 

 

 

 

170

171

without a knowledge of this crucial two-year period in his
life, scholars have not examined it in any detail."

Jean Hytier, The Poetics of Paul Valery (New York:
Doubleday, 1953), p. 52. "The word Orient suggested a
highly colored evocation . . . 'The 1magined Orient of the

mind offers an intoxicated mind the most delic1ous disorder
0"

 

Paul Valery, hegas Manet Morisot (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1960; first pu ished in 1931), p. 25. ". . . above
all Japanese prints came to be admired and studied by artists
. . . Finally there was the sensitized plate."

Paul Valery, The Outlook For Intelli ence (New York.
Harper and Row, 1962), p. 17. *"So The art11cial imbalance
of power on which European predominance has been based for
three hundred years is tending rapidly to vanish . . . Asia
is four times larger than Europe . . . Will Europe become
what it is in reality--that is, a little promontory of the
continent of Asia?"

12Lawrence Binyon, The Flight of the Dra on: An
Essay on the Theory and Practice of Art in China and Japan
Based on Original Sources (New York: Grove Press, first
published in 1911), p. 95. "Whether the doctrine of art
for art's sake was explicitly promulgated in the Far East,
I do not know; but if it was, I think the Chinese, with their
innate sanity, would have said; Yes, for the artist an ad-
mirable doctrine, but for the public absurd . . . I have
tried in this all but too hasty sketch to interpret as faith-
fully as I could the indwelling spirit and ideal of the art
of the Far East. But I feel how imperfect is my knowledge,
and I am sure that no interpretation can really give what
the art itself alone can yield--its live, essential breath.
I can but echo the words of an Eastern poet 'Oh that with
this blossoming p1um-branch I could offer/ the song with
which this morning it was quivering!'" p. 6. ". . . the
artist must pierce beneath the mere aspect of the world to
seize and himself to be possessed by that great cosmic
rhythm of the spirit which sets the currents of life in
motion. We should say in Europe that he must seize the
universal in the particular . . . we find in Chinese art
a strong synthetic power, which differentiates it . . .
We note also in their conception of art, a much greater
stress laid on the subjective element than with us. 'The
secret of art' says the twelfth century critic Kuo Jo-hsu,
'lies in the artist himself.'"

 

172

13Eustice Mullins, This Difficult Individual, Ezra
Pound (New York: Fleet Publishing Corporation, 1961), p.
64. "Pound had a project of his own. He was the literary
executor of Ernest Fenelloss, a scholar who had spent many
years in Japan studying the Noh drama. 'A little school of
devotees of the Noh grew up in London . . . including Pound,
Yeats, Arthur Waley, and Edmund Dulac.'"

14Stanley Weintraub, Journey to Heartbreak (New
York: Weybright and Talley, 1971), p. 206. "As)1916 ended
and 1917 began, G. B. Shaw heard from one of the earliest
women in his life, Florence Farr, whom he had loved when he
was a young playwright. Se was the epitome of the emancipated
woman, detaching herself from a husband of minor talents and
making her own career as an actress and writer, and mistress
first to Shaw and afterward to Yeats. She had gone to
Ceylon . . . the logical outcome of her long interest in
Eastern thought."

15Thomas Sturge Moore was a close friend and corres-
pondent of William Butler Yeats; primarily a figurative
artist, he, along with Yeats, studied the Noh theatre.
Quoted in W. B. Yeats and T. Sturge Moore: Their Corres-
ondence 1901-1937 (New York: Oiford University Press,
1953), p. 47.

16John S. Harrison, The Teachers of Emerson (New
York: Sturgis and Walton, 1910), p. 278. "In Emerson's
poem, 'Brahma', is found an expression of Emerson's doctrine
of soul, or God, which is almost entirely Hindoo in its
manner of speech. Without a knowledge of the Bagavat-Gita
the poem could never have assumed the form it now has."

 

 

T. R. Rajasekharaiah, The Roots of Whitman's Grass
(Madison: Farleight Dickinson University Press,)l970), p.
1. "That Walt Whitman might be indebted in some way to the
ancient poets of India was suspected as early as 1856 by
Thoreau, who said he found Leaves of Grass 'wonderfully
like the Orientals' meaning of the Sanskirit poems'.

. . . Other readers of Whitman also continued to see puz-
zling similarities, such as Edward Carpenter, a British
minor poet who visited Whitman in 1877 and later compiled
a list of parallels in Leaves of Grass and the Upanishads,
Mahaparinibbanay_Suttanta, and the Bhagavad-Gita--but also
the Chinese SayIngs of Lao-tzu.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Harry Blamires, Word Unheard (London: Methuen
and Co., Ltd., 1969), p. 103. "'I sometimes wonder if that
is what Krishna meant'. There is reference here to the
Hindu scriptures, the Bhagavad-Gita. Krishnia exhorts

 

173

Arjuna to acquire disinterestedness. Man must always act
as if there were to be no tomorrow. The advice coincides
with Eliot's warnings against living for the future and
justifying actions according to their results.”

17 William Butler Yeats, "Under Ben Bulben, " The
Collected Poems of William Butler Yeats (London: Macm1llan,
l933),p . 72.

18William Butler Yeats, The Letters of W. B. Yeats,
ed. A. Wade (London: Hart- -Davis, l954),p . 309.

19T. S. Eliot, quoted in Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), p. 166.

20Ford Madox Ford, quoted in Hugh Kenner, The Pound
Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), p.'166.

21Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1971), p. 1667

 

 

 

 

22T. 8. Eliot, "Burnt Norton," The Complete Poems
and Playe (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1952), p. 21.

23Ibid.

24

John Fletcher, Beckett: A Study of His Plays
(London: Eyre Methuen, 1972), p. 22.

25William Butler Yeats, "The Circus Animals'
Desertion," The Collected Poems of William Butler Yeats
(London: Macmillan, 1933), p. 335.

26James Joyce, Letters (New York: Viking Press,
1957), p. 567.

27Samuel Beckett in a letter to Alan Schneider,
dated August 12, 1957, as quoted in Alec Reid All I Can
JManage, More Than I Could: An Approach to the Plays Of
Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 1968), p. 33.

28Samuel Beckett, Waiting For Godot (New York: Grove
Press, 1954), p. 48.

29Beckett At 60, ed. John Calder (London: Calder
and.Boyars, 1967), p. 2.

30

 

 

Reid, p. 12.

31Hugh Kenner, A Reader's Guide to Samuel Beckett
(London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), p. 27.

174

32Jeremy Kingston in a personal interview with this
author in London on October 16, 1973. Mr. Kingston is
theatre critic for Punch magazine.

33Ibid.

34Samuel Beckett, Proust (London: Calder and Boyars,
1931), p. 19.

35Watts, p. 185.

CHAPTER II

 

1Samuel Beckett, Endgame (New York: Grove Press,
1958), p. 25.

2Zemmaro Toki, Japanese No Poetry (Tokyo: Japna
Travel Bureau, 1954), p. 118.

3Twenty Plays of the Noh Theatre, ed. Donald Keene
(New York: COIumbia University Press, 1970), pp. 306-7.

 

4Faubion Bowers, Japanese Theatre (New York:
Hermitage House, 1952), p. 21.

 

SKeene, p. 14.

6Ibid.

7Toki, p. llt.

8Earle Ernst, Three Japanese Plays from the Tradi-
tional Theatre (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1959)
p. 15.

 

 

11Richard N. McKinnon, "The No and Zeami," Far
Eastern Quarterly, 11, No. 3 (1952), p. 355.

12

 

Toki, p. 16.

13Endgame, p. 9.

14Ibid., p. 75.

15Ibid., p. 20.

I . I!"

 

'F

175

16Leonard Pronko, Theatre East and West (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1967), p. 107.

17D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover (New

York: Grove Press, 1959), p. l.

18Ernst, p. 13.

19Keene, p. 111.

ZOIbid.

 

21Pronko, p. 108.

22Ernst, p. 4.

23Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (New
York: Doubleday-Anchor Books, 1961), pp. 55-56.

24Susumu Yamaguchi, Qynamic Buddha and Static Buddha
(Tokyo: Risosha Ltd., 1958), pp. 22-23.

25Edmond Holmes, The Creed of Buddha (London: The
Bodley Head, 1908), p. 3.

26Supti Sen, Samuel Beckett: His Mind and Art

(Calcutta: K. L. Mukhopadhyago, 1970), p. 168.
27

 

Holmes, p. 2.
Z8Ernst, p. 4.
zglbid.

3O

Holmes, p. 146.

31Ihab Hassan, The Literature of Silence: Henry
iMiller and Samuel Beckett (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1967),
p. 206. ,

32Ernst, p. 13.

33Hassan, p. 207.

34Samuel Beckett quoted in Lawrence E. Harvey,
Samuel Beckett: Peet and Critic (Princeton University
Press, 1970), p. 433.

35Samuel Beckett quoted in Tom Driver, "Beckett and
'the Madeleine," Columbia University Press, IV, (Summer, 1961),
p. 23.

176

36Hassan, p. 209.

37

38Ezra Pound, Noh or Accomplishment: A Study of
the Classical Stege of Japan (London: Macmillan and Co.,
1916), p. 14.

39Samuel Beckett, Waiting For Godot (New York:
Grove Press, 1954), p. 7.

4oAlec Reid, All I Can Mana e4 More Than I Could:
An Approach to the Plays of Samuel eékett (New York:
Grove Press, 1968), p. 34.

41Harold Hobson, quoted in Beckett At 60, ed. John
Calder (London: Calder and Boyars, 1967), p. 25.

42William Butler Yeats in Letters to Katherine
Tynan, ed. Roger McHugh (New York: *McMullen Books, 1953),
p. 323.

Bowers, p. 24.

 

 

 

 

43Ibid.

44Ibid., p. 325.

45William Butler Yeats, The Collected Plays of w.
B. Yeats (London: Macmillan and Co., 1934), p. 73.

46

 

 

Ibid., p. 609.

47Ibid., p. 624.

48Josephine Jacobsen, The Testament of Samuel Beckett
(London: Faber and Faber, Ltd., 1964), p. 34.

49Yasuo Nakamura, Noh: The Classical Theatre (Tokyo:
‘Walker/Weatherhill, 1971), p. 232.

50

 

Reid, p. 34.

51Eugene Ionesco, quoted in Nakamura, p. 237.

52Bowers, p. 21.

53Hugh Kenner, A Reader's Guide To Samuel Beckett
(London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), p. 23.

54Yukio Mishima, Five Modern No Plays (New York:
.Alfred A. Knopf, 1957), p. 137.

177

55John Fletcher, Beckett: A Study of His Plays
(London: Eyre Methuen, 1972), p. 26.

56

 

Nakamura, p. 213.

57Mishima, p. 106.

58G. C. Barnard, Samuel Beckett: A New Approach
(New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1970), p. 82.

59

 

Mishima, p. x.

60Samuel Beckett, Play and Two Short Pieces For
Radio (London: Faber and Faber, Ltd}, 1964), p. 3.

61

 

Ernst, p. 48.

62Peter Arnot, The Theatre of Japan (London: Mac-
millan and Company, 1969), p. 96.

 

63Samuel Beckett, Krapp's Last Tepe and Other
Dramatic Pieces (New York: Grove Press, 1957), p. 2.

64

 

Arnot, p. 99.
65Ibid.

CHAPTER III

1Franz Kafka quoted in Ihab Hassan, The Dismember-
ment of Orpheus (London: ,Oxford University Press, 1970),
p. 11}

 

 

2Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
(New York: Vintage Books, 1955), p. 88.

3Ihab Hassan, The Dismemberment of Orpheus (London:
Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 24}

4Ibid., p. 38.

5Ibid., p. 39.

6Samuel Beckett, Three Novels by Samuel Beckett:
Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamahle (New York: Grove Press,
1955), p. 179.

178

7Walpola Rahula, What the Buddha Taught (Bedford:
Gordon Fraser, Inc., 1959), p. 32.

8Thomas Merton, Zen ad the Birds of Appetite
(New York: New Directions, 1968), p. 80.

9

 

Rahula, p. 34.

10Edmond Holmes, "The Teachings of Buddha," The
Creed of Buddha (London: The Bodley Head, 1908), p. 69.

11Webster's Third New International Dictionary (New
York: G. C. Merriam and Company, 1971), p.51340.

12Kenneth Ch'en, Buddhism: The Light of Asia (New
York: Barron's Educational Series, 1968), p. 81.

13

 

 

Ibid.

 

14Ibid.

15Rhys Davis, Psalms of the Early Buddhist (London:
H. Frowde, 1913), p. 143.

 

16Ibid., p. 93.
17Ch'en, p. 38.
18

Ananda Guruge, Facets of Buddhism (Ceylon:
Swabhasha Prakashakayo Ltd., 1967), p. 14.

19Susan Sontag, "The Aesthetics of Silence,"
Styles of Radiacl Will (New York: Farrar, Straus, and
Giroux, 1969), p. 18.

20Samuel Beckett, Murphy (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul Ltd., 1938), p. .

 

 

 

21Samuel Beckett, Watt (New York: Grove Press, 1953),
p. 69.

22Samuel Beckett, How It Is (New York: Grove Press,
1964), p. 9.

23Watt, pp. 137-138.

24Holmes, p. 111.

25Ibid., p. 95.

179

26Molloy, p. 7.
27Ibid., p. 8.

28T. S. Eliot, "The Waste Land," The Collected Poems
and Plays (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1952),
p. 47, 11. 331-340.

 

29Molloy, p. 9.

30The Oxford Annotated Bible, ed., Herbert G. May
(New York: OxfOrd University Press, 1962), p. 823.

31The Unnamable, p. 291.

 

32The Oxford Annotated Bible, p. 823.

CHAPTER IV

1Donald Keene, Japanese Literature: An Introduction
for Western Readers (New York: Grove Press, 1955), p. 11.

2Ezra Pound, "A Few Don't's By An Imagist," Poetr :
A Magazine of Verse, Vol. I, No. 1 (October-March, 1912-

1913).

3Samuel Beckett, Proust (London: Calder and Boyars,
1965), p. 23.

4Kenneth Yasuda, The Japanese Haiku: Its Essential
Nature, History and Possibilities (Rutland, Vermont: Charles

E. Tuttle Company, 1957), p. 9.

SCleanth Brooks, Modern Poetry and the Tradition
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1939),

p. 16.

6Isoji A50, The Development of Haiku Taste (Tokyo:
Takyodo, 1944), p. 208.

7Richard Ellman, James Joyce (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1959), p. 362. _

8Yasuda, p. 11.

9Ibid.

 

180

10T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood (London: Methuen,
1950), p. ix.

11Gertrude Patterson, T. S. Eliot: Poems in the
Making (London: Manchester University Press, l971), p. 157.

12Samuel Beckett quoted in Tom Driver, "Beckett by
the Madeleine," Columbia University Forum, IV, (Summer,
1961), p. 22.

13John Gould Fletcher, "The Orient and Contemporary
Poetry," The Asian Legacy and American Life, ed. Arthur E.
Christy (New York: JOhn Day, 1945), p. 109.

14Samuel Beckett, quoted in Proust and Three Dia-
Tegues with Georges Duthuit (London: Calder and Boyars,
1965), p. ll8.

15Barbara J. Bucknall, The Religion of Art in Proust
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970), p. 209.

16

 

 

Ibid.

17Pound, p. 18.

18Bucknall, p. 212.

19Robert Sohl, The Gospel According to Zen (New York:
New American Library, 1970), p. 30.

20Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea
(New York: Scribner's, 1948).

21

 

 

Bucknall, p. 234.

22Robert Zaehner, Mysticism, Sacred and Profane: An
Inqyiry into Some Varieties of Praeturnatural ExperiencelTNew
thk: OxfOrd University Press, 196l), p. 56.

 

23Proust, p. 42.

24Sohl, p. 31.

25Zaehner, pp. 161-164.

ZGLEES-

Z7Marcel Proust quoted in Justin O'Brien, The Maxims

 

of Marcel Proust (New York: Columbia University Press,
1948), p. 177.

181

28George Cattaui, Marcel Proust: Proust et son temps,
Proust et 1e temps (Paris: JGlliard, 1952), p. 171.

29Marguerite Yourcenar, Nouvelles Orientales (Paris:
Gallimard, 1963).

SOProust quoted in The Maxims of Marcel Proust, ed.
by Justin O'Brien (New York: Columbia University Press,
1948), p. 177.

31Theodore DeBary, The Buddhist Tradition (New York:
The Modern Library, 1969), p. 121}

32

 

 

 

Bucknall, p. 191.

33Samuel Beckett, Poems in English by Samuel Beckett
(New York: Grove Press, 1961), p. 21.

34Christmas Humphrey, Buddhism (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 1955), p. 87.

35Sohl, p. 33.

36Yasuda, p. 7.

371bid., p. o.

 

38Ibid.

39Daisetz Suzuki, Essence of Buddhism (London:
Buddhist Society, 1947), p. 38.

40Yasuda, p. 14.

41Khantipalo Bhikku, Buddhism Explained (Bangkok:
Social Science Association of Thailand, 1968), p. 44.

42Sohl, p. 48.

43Ibid.

 

44Seki Osuga, Collected Essays on Haiku Theory
(Tokyo: Kaedo Shobo, 1947), p. 30.

4SBasho, Collected Haiku of Basho/(Tokyo: Iwanami,
1953), p. 78.

46Osuga, p. 112

182

47Yasuda, p. 12.

48Thomas Merton, Zen and the Birds of Appetite
(New York: New Directions, 1968), p. 79.

49Sohl, p. 53.

50Ibid.

 

51W. H. Cohen, To Walk in Seasons: An Introduction
to Haiku (Rutland, Vermont: Charles E. Tuttle Company,
1972), p. 31.

52Ibid.
53Louis Untermeyer, American Poetry Since 1900 (New
York: H. Holt and Company, l923)l

54Samuel Beckett, Krapp's Last Tape and Other Dramatic
Pieces (New York: Grove Press, 1957), p. 84}

SSD.E.S. Maxwell, The Poetry of T. 8. Eliot (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952), p. 98.

56Gertrude Patterson, p. 138.

57T. S. Eliot, "The Waste Land", The Complete Poems
and Plays (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1954),

T

p. 38, 11. 38-41.

58Samuel Beckett, More Prinks Than Kicks (New York:
Grove Press, 1972), p. 159.

59Alan W. Watts, The Way of Zen (New York: Vintage
Books, 1957), p. 189.

60DeBary, p. 121.

61Bhikku, p. 45.

62Lakshmi Narasu, Essence of Buddhism (Madras:
Srinvasa Varadachari and Company, 1912), p. 118.

63Ibid.

64Ibid., p. 125.

6SIbid.

66DeBary, p. 121.

183

67Bhikku, p. 142.

68Suzuki, p. 183.

69Ibid.

 

70Holmes, p. 48.

71

Ibid., p. 80. ._
72 FE]

Ibid., p. 83.

 

 

 

 

CONCLUSION

1Alan W. Watts, The Way of Zen (New York: Vintage éJ
Books, 1957), p. 185.

2Ibid., p. 186.
AFTERWORD

1

Samuel Beckett, The Lost Ones (New York: Grove
Press, 1972), p. 8.

2Samuel Beckett, Breath and Other Shorts by Samuel
Beckett (London: Faber and Faber, 1971), p. 18}

3Alan Watts, The Way of Zen (New York: Vintage
Books, 1957), p. 78.

 

 

 

4Maurice Percheron, Buddha and Buddhism (New York:
Harper and Row, 1954), p. 41.

5Samuel Beckett, Happy Days (New York: Grove Press,
1961), p. 71

 

 

6Percheron, p. 41.

7Breath and Other Shorts, p. 45.

 

8Samuel Beckett, "Poem 3", Poems In English (New
York: Grove Press, 1961), p. 59.

 

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184

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