Still: Samuel Beckett's Quietism

Andy Wimbush, Paul Stewart

• Publisher: ibidem
• Year: 2020
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• eBook ISBN:
  9783838291956

In the 1930s, a young Samuel Beckett confessed to a friend that he had been living his life according to an 'abject self-referring quietism'. Andy Wimbush argues that 'quietism'-a philosophical and religious attitude of renunciation and will-lessness-is a key to understanding Beckett's artistic vision and the development of his career as a fiction writer from his early novels Dream of Fair to Middling Women and Murphy to late short prose texts such as Stirrings Still and Company. Using Beckett's published and archival material, Still: Samuel Beckett's Quietism shows how Beckett distilled an understanding of quietism from the work of Arthur Schopenhauer, E.M. Cioran, Thomas a Kempis, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Andre Gide, before turning it into an aesthetic that would liberate him from the powerful literary traditions of nineteenth-century realism and early twentieth-century high modernism. Quietism, argues Andy Wimbush, was for Beckett a lifelong preoccupation that shaped his perspectives on art, relationships, ethics, and even notions of salvation. But most of all it showed Beckett a way to renounce authorial power and write from a position of impotence, ignorance, and incoherence so as to produce a new kind of fiction that had, in Molloy's words, the 'tranquility of decomposition'.

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations and conventions
• Introduction La vie très quiétiste
• Chapter 1 Dereliction into Literature: Quietism and Beckett’s 1930s
• Chapter 2 A Sufferer of My Pains: Murphy and the Little World
• Chapter 3 Remnants of a Pensum: Decay and quietist aesthetics from Dream of Fair to Middling Women to Molloy
• Chapter 4 The Sage Under the Bo: How It Is, Ernst Haeckel and Beckett’s (German) Buddhism
• Chapter 5 so much short of blessed nothing: Salvation, rebirth and the late prose
• Afterword
• Bibliography