Creative Involution: Bergson, Beckett, Deleuze

209 Pages·2015·0.925 MB·English

by  S. E. Gontarski

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Creative Involution
Bergson, Beckett, Deleuze
S. E. GontarSkI
Creative Involution
A novel is never anything but a philosophy
put into images. And in a good novel, the whole of the
philosophy has passed into images.
Albert Camus, review of Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre
Creative Involution
Bergson, Beckett, Deleuze
S. E. Gontarski
© S. E. Gontarski, 2015
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
The Tun – Holyrood Road
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The right of S. E. Gontarski to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and
the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).
Contents
Other Becketts: Series Preface vii
Abbreviations for Works by Samuel Beckett viii
Acknowledgements ix
1 ‘All the Dead Voices’: A Preface 1
2 ‘A Mixed Choir’ from The Ditch of Astonishment:
An Introduction 6
Anteriors
3 The Invention of the Modern: A Symbiotic
Remapping 33
4 ‘Thought Thinks in its Own Right’: A. A. Luce,
Samuel Beckett and Bergson’s Doctrine of Failure 77
Interiors
5 Towards a Creative Involution 93
6 ‘What it is to Have Been’: Movement, Multiplicity
and Representation 115
7 Beyond the Shadow: Acts of Unceasing Creation 132
8 A Theatre of Deterritorialization and the Questions
We Ask 147
Posteriors
9 Becoming Degree Zero: Authors Vanishing into the
Zone of Imperceptibility 173
Index 187
For Marsha,
again and again
Other Becketts:
Series Preface
General Editor: S. E. Gontarski, Florida State University
In 1997 Apple computers launched an advertising campaign (in
print and on television) that entreated us to ‘Think Different’, and
Samuel Beckett was one of Apple’s icons. Avoiding Apple’s sole-
cism, we might modify the appeal to say that Other Becketts is a
call to think differently as well, in this case about Beckett’s work,
to question, that is, even the questions we ask about it. Other
Becketts, then, is a series of monographs focused on alternative,
unexplored, or under-e xplored approaches to the work of Samuel
Beckett, not a call for novelty per se, but a call to examine afresh
those of Beckett’s interests that were more arcane than main-
stream, interests that might be deemed quirky or strange, and
those of his works less thoroughly explored critically and theoreti-
cally, the late prose and drama, say, or even the poetry or criti-
cism. Volumes might cover (but are not restricted to) any of the
following: unusual illnesses or neurological disorders (the ‘duck
foot, goose foot’ of First Love, akathisia or the invented duck’s
disease or panpygoptosis of Miss Dew in Murphy, proprioception,
or its disturbance, in Not I, perhaps, or other unusual neurologi-
cal lapses among Beckett’s creatures, from Watt to the Listener
of That Time); mathematical peculiarities (irrational numbers,
factorials, Fibonacci numbers or sequences, or non- Euclidian
approaches to geometry); linguistic failures (from Nominalism to
Mauthner, say); citations of or allusions to contrarian aesthetic
philosophers working in a more or less irrationalist tradition
(Nietzsche, Bergson, or Deleuze, among others), or in general ‘the
simple games that time plays with space’. Alternative approaches
would be of interest as well, with foci on objects, animals, cogni-
tive or memory issues, and the like.
vii
Abbreviations for Works by
Samuel Beckett
Arikha Arikha, Paris: Hermann, 1985.
CDW The Complete Dramatic Works, London: Faber
and Faber, 1986.
CSP The Complete Short Prose, 1929–1989, ed. S. E.
Gontarski, New York: Grove Press, 1995.
Dream Dream of Fair to Middling Women, ed. Eoin
OBrien and Edith Fournier, Dublin: Black Cat
Press, 1992; New York: Arcade Publishing, 1993.
Endgame Endgame, New York: Grove, 1958.
Godot Waiting for Godot, New York: Grove Press, 1954.
Letters 1 The Letters of Samuel Beckett Volume 1, 1929–
1940, ed. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More
Overbeck, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2009.
Letters 2 The Letters of Samuel Beckett Volume 2, 1941–
1956, ed. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld,
Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Murphy Murphy, New York: Grove, 1957.
Proust Proust, New York: Grove, 1957.
Three Novels Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The
Unnamable, New York: Grove Press, 1955.
Watt Watt, New York: Grove, 1959.
Worstward Worstward Ho. Nohow On, New York: Grove
Press, 1996.
viii
Acknowledgements
Such extended scholarly meditations inevitably gestate through
a protracted process, from postgraduate seminars, through con-
ference presentations and preliminary publications, to, finally, a
book, and this study is no exception. My postgraduate students
in seminars on Modernism and Bergson, Beckett and Deleuze,
in various configurations and at various universities, have not
only allowed me to continue my research interest on the inter-
sections of these figures and philo-l iterary Modernism but have
often led it, supporting and enhancing this research through their
enthusiasm, initiative, diligence, clear thinking and scholarly
dedication. Through my Bergson seminars in particular, two of
my students, Paul Ardoin and Laci Mattison, have become col-
laborators, co- editors of a pair of volumes having grown out
of those seminars at Florida State University: Understanding
Bergson / Understanding Modernism and Understanding Deleuze
/ Understanding Modernism. Those volumes have now devel-
oped into a robust book series, Understanding Philosophy /
Understanding Modernism, and Ardoin and Mattison join me as
General Editors of the series with Bloomsbury Academic.
Early versions of many of the chapters herein have been
presented at various international conferences and workshops,
including two meetings of the ongoing Samuel Beckett Working
Group, one in Dublin as part of the Beckett centenary in 2006 and
one in Tokyo in 2012, and I am grateful to the organizers of those
sessions, Linda Ben-Z vi, the late Julie Campbell, and Mariko Hori
Tanaka, for opportunities to work with that group. The indefati-
gable Tomasz Wisniewski, of the University of Gdansk, Poland,
has been more helpful than he knows, first by inviting me to deliver
a keynote address at the Back to the Beckett Text: Beckett na
Plazy conference in Sopot, Poland in 2010 and then to subsequent
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