Abstract
Beckett’s aesthetic sensibility was essentially Romantic. His early work, steeped in irony though it is, remains fundamentally indebted to a vocabulary and a trove of themes that he inherited from a wide array of philosophers and poets writing as early as the seventeenth century, and he goes on in subsequent fiction and drama to develop his two core Romantic themes: the schism between subject and object and the indestructibility of the creative imagination. Beckett critiques the notion that the mechanical-mathematical paradigm of explanation, which necessarily leads to materialism or dualism, is an accurate description of reality. Materialism and dualism, for Beckett, are equally unsatisfactory. His preference, instead, is for the “clair-obscur,” the liminal, the indeterminate, the incoherent--each of which runs throughout a number of Romanticisms that were formative in Beckett’s own development, thus demonstrating the ultimate futility of classifying Modernist and Postmodernist literature as anything other than indeterminate Post-Romanticisms. In Imagination Dead Imagine and Company, Beckett begins to move away from the solipsistic world of All Strange Away toward a recognition of the external world and, most significantly, to imaginative possibilities that are never absent in Beckett’s purgatorial world of movement, flux, and vitality. And in Ill Seen Ill Said and Worstward Ho, he demonstrates, through an unparalleled imaginative and linguistic agility, the dynamism of the artist and his material, thereby effecting what he had long ago referred to as the “ideal real”: an “extra-temporal” experiential interplay or oscillation between subject and object, form and content, eye and mind, empiricism and imagination.
|
