Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Series Editor’s Preface
- List of Abbreviations
- Dedication
- Introduction
- 1 A Poetics of Translation: Dante, Goethe and the Paideia
- 2 Pythagorean Mysticism/Democritean Wisdom
- 3 The Physical Cosmos: Aristotelian Dialectics
- 4 From the Cradle to the Cave: A Comedy of Ethics from Plato to Christian Asceticism (via Rembrandt)
- 5 Mystic Paths, Inward Turns
- 6 Pasca l’s Miraculous Tongue
- 7 Spinoza, Leibniz or a World ‘Less Exquisitely Organized’
- Acknowledgements
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - Pasca l’s Miraculous Tongue
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 April 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Series Editor’s Preface
- List of Abbreviations
- Dedication
- Introduction
- 1 A Poetics of Translation: Dante, Goethe and the Paideia
- 2 Pythagorean Mysticism/Democritean Wisdom
- 3 The Physical Cosmos: Aristotelian Dialectics
- 4 From the Cradle to the Cave: A Comedy of Ethics from Plato to Christian Asceticism (via Rembrandt)
- 5 Mystic Paths, Inward Turns
- 6 Pasca l’s Miraculous Tongue
- 7 Spinoza, Leibniz or a World ‘Less Exquisitely Organized’
- Acknowledgements
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Quelle chimère est-ce donc que l’homme ? Quelle nouveauté, quel chaos, quel sujet de contradiction ? Juge de toutes choses, imbécile ver de terre ; dépositaire du vrai, amas d’incertitude ; gloire, et rebut de l’univers.
Blaise Pascal, Penseés ([1905] 186)What sort of a monster then is man? What a novelty, what a portent, what a chaos, what a mass of contradictions, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, a ridiculous earthworm who is the repository of truth, a sink of uncertainty and error; the glory and scum of the world.
Blaise Pascal, Pensées ([1962] 169)Pascal's vision of the impoverished human condition finds its comic, atheistic incarnation in Beckett's post-World War II novels. In the Pensées, Pascal condemns humanity's faith in reason as an absurdity and its aspirations to material happiness as worthy of nothing but pity. These sentiments chimed with Beckett, who rejected Pascal's unwavering fideism yet continued to count him among his select ‘old chestnuts’ into his old age (Knowlson, Damned 653). Pascal's influence on Beckett's writing has attracted relatively little attention. His extreme asceticism and belief in miracles offered Beckett the perfect caricature of one striving overzealously for the Quietist's humility. This chapter will first account for Beckett's knowledge of Pascal, and chart Pascalian figures common to L’Innommable/The Unnamable and Comment c’est/How It Is. The historical figure of Blaise Pascal, as much as his Pensées, emerges as a source of inspiration for Beckett, who uses both to implicate his characters in ever-deeper philosophical conundra. By exploiting eccentric episodes in Pascal's life and writing, Beckett could mock his characters’ pious aspirations and their desire to escape the residue of their learning and experience through miraculous transportation.
Beckett's intertextuality has been theorised variously as his ‘poetics of unknowing’ (Nixon, German Diaries 181), ‘poetics of ignorance’ (Van Hulle, ‘Faust Notes’ 291) and ‘poetics of residua’ (Caselli, ‘The Promise’ 249), all these formulations intimating a method of composition whereby to write he needed to first divest himself of his erudition, of what he called in his short poem ‘Gnome’ the ‘loutishness of learning’.
- Type
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- Information
- Samuel Beckett's How It IsPhilosophy in Translation, pp. 194 - 219Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2018