Public Lecture: Beckett's Unhappiness

"An Intellectual Justification of Unhappiness": Samuel Beckett's Aesthetic War on the Theodicies

A public lecture by Professor Andrew Gibson (Royal Holloway, University of London)

Thursday 30 June, 5 for 5.30pm. Lecture Theatre G04, Napier Building

Over the past twenty-five years, Beckett scholarship has seen an explosion of three kinds of work above all: philosophical and theoretical, historical, and archival. However, whilst the humanist tradition in Beckett Studies has survived and indeed at times prospered under the sway of the new methodologies, another Beckett as old as the humanist one has receded if not been marginalized. This was a Beckett, however funny, also surrendered to melancholy, despair and anguish, a poet of suffering, an austere, drastically sceptical renouncer and disparager of the usual goods, a world-hater whose most fundamental conviction might seem summed up in  a single two-word sentence from Rockabye: `Fuck life!’

This lecture will seek to revive and even promote Beckettian negativity in its full weight, but by understanding it in its complexity as involving an intellectual project of the most distinguished, demanding and honourable kind. From the upbeat nationalisms of Ireland in the 1920s to the fraudulent ideological boosterism of Vichy France to the new French humanism of the fourth Republic to the self-inflating propaganda machines of the Cold War to the euphoria that attended the coming down of the Berlin Wall, Beckett was appalled by the speed and readiness with which facile positivities were repeatedly pasted over a history of horror, steadily gained ground on it, and finally threatened to obliterate its living memory. His work pervasively articulates his moral revulsion at the process. The lecture will argue, however, that, whilst we need to know the relevant historical contexts in order to be fully aware of this, we also need to prise Beckett loose from the ever-more insistent attempts to identify his work more or less exclusively with the terms of contemporary ethics and aesthetics (including `trauma theory’). We should rather place him in an ancient tradition that runs through a succession of writers in whose work he was steeped (St. Augustine, Pascal, Swift, Johnson, Voltaire, Schopenhauer),  a literary and philosophical tradition that fiercely takes up arms in a war against the theodicies. At a time when theodicean discourses seem audible everywhere again, both Beckett and his tradition remain crucial to us.