Beckett and Nietzsche: The Acoustical Illusion of Being / Becoming
  Lucyna Janina Swiatek
Literary and philosophical theory has been endlessly applied to the work of Samuel Beckett, usually with the purpose of finding a meaning, a message, or an underlying world view. However, to conduct a Nietzschean reading of Beckett in this manner raises intractable problems, if the goal is to ‘find’ Nietzsche in Beckett, or vice-versa. Instead, I propose to perform a more open-ended enquiry into Beckett / Nietzsche, to find a textual moment of contact, poised somewhere between denial and affirmation. This intertextual form of understanding will focus on the nature of Being / Becoming in Beckett and Nietzsche. At first glance, articulating Being / Becoming might seem at odds with these two writers who cleave, in different ways, to the notion that there is ‘nothing to express’. Both Beckett and Nietzsche surmount this, however, in their explorations of metaphysical notions of Being.

Beckett’s final full-length prose work, How It Is (1964), has had critical backing for its metaphorical rendering of human suffering, cruelty and loneliness, as well as for its demonstration of meaninglessness and stasis. Identifying a Nietzschean poetics within the form and structure of this text, I propose a counter-reading that stresses movement and change, a reflection of Nietzsche’s distaste for the fixed metaphysics of Being. In keeping with this, Nietzschean Werden, or Becoming, is a process that allows for history, development and intimate self-understanding. This counter-reading will also draw on Beckett’s unpublished diary notations, using them as a theoretical resource alongside Nietzsche’s more overt challenges to conventional ways of thinking about the nature of Being and the self. The enigmatic nature of the space demarcated for the ‘inner self’ is aptly framed by Beckett’s question, “How can one travel to that which one cannot move away?” I will not attempt to reconcile the differences between Beckett and Nietzsche on the question of Being / Becoming, but rather situate the tension that both binds and repels them, and show how this interactive process can be used to illuminate the nature and (non)existence of the ‘inner self’.

PhD candidate, Macquarie University
Borderless Beckett:
International Samuel Beckett Symposium in Tokyo 2006
September 29 – October 1