Content area
Full text
Recent Publications David Tucker, Samuel Beckett and Arnold Geulincx: Tracing a Literary Fantasia. London: Continuum, 2012. 217+xvipp. ?18.99pbk, ?60hbk, $122hbk, $39.95pbk.
David Tucker, Samuel Beckett and Arnold Geulincx: Tracing a Literary Fantasia (Bloomsbury, 2012)
As the useful 'Chronology' that prefaces David Tucker's meticulous study makes clear (xiii-xiv), Beckett's direct engagement with the work of seventeenth-century Occasionalist philosopher Arnold Geulincx probably involved no more than an 'intense few months' (42) between early January and early April 1936 when Beckett broached the 'abhorred gates' (SB to TM 9 January 1936; qtd in Tucker 1) of Trinity College Dublin to consult the only copy of Geulincx's Opera Philosophica then available in Ireland. By 9 April he was confessing to MacGreevy that he 'could not quite finish' Geulincx's Ethics and its lessons on abstinence, 'even in Lent' (SB to TM 9 April 1936; qtd in Tucker xiv). Nevertheless, as was his practice in the 'notesnatching' period of the 1930s, Beckett's voluminous transcriptions of Geulincx made their way directly into the composition of the novel he was working on, Murphy, where he ostentatiously quotes the 'beautiful Belgo-Latin' of Geulincx's axiom: Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis (Murphy 112); 'Wherein you have no power, therein you should not will'. Though there are scattered mentions of Geulincx and allusions to Geulingian imagery throughout Beckett's later work, especially in 'The End' and the Trilogy, there is no evidence that Beckett ever returned to Geulincx or his notes on Geulincx again. Nevertheless, in an often-quoted letter to Sighle Kennedy in 1967, Beckett proffers Geulincx's axiom as one of two 'points of departure' for anyone in the 'unenviable position' of having to study his work (qtd in Tucker 39), a suggestion he repeated in correspondence with Georges Duthuit, Niall Montgomery, Erich Franzen, Mary Hutchinson and Lawrence Harvey (37-41). As Tucker judiciously remarks in his conclusion, 'taking Beckett at his word when it comes to assessments or descriptions of his own work can be a fraught problem' (181). All the same, Geulincx has been a fixture of Beckett Studies from its inception, appearing in Ruby Cohn's special issue of Perspective in 1959 and Hugh Kenner's inaugural monograph study of 1961, and culminating in 2006 in the republication, by Anthony Uhlmann, Han van Ruler and Martin Wilson,...