BECKETT AND ABSTRACTION 251

Beckett and Abstraction

Charlotta Palmstierna Einarsson
(University of Stockholm, Sweden)

In a 1969 interview, twenty years after his celebrated Three

Dialogues with Georges Duthuit, Beckett claimed to have –
“perhaps” – found an escape from the dilemma of mimetic
representation: ‘I think perhaps I have freed myself from certain
formal concepts. Perhaps, like the composer Schoenberg or the
painter Kandinsky, I have turned toward an abstract language.
Unlike them, however, I have tried not to concretize the
abstraction’. This chapter proposes to explore this philosophical
notion of “the abstract” in Beckett’s work, both in relation to
Kandinsky’s paintings, and as evolving out of Beckett’s
realization of the role of perception in aesthetic experience. For
Beckett, as for Kandinsky art presents, or makes manifest, what
essentially has no equivalent in the objective world of
phenomena. The implication of this is that the work of art no
longer has to be, or even can be, a mimetic representation of
reality. This “phenomenological approach to artistic production
has been considered by Michel Henry with respect to Kandinsky;
however, very little research exists relating to Beckett’s own
project of phenomenological abstraction in the postwar
fiction/drama. In approaching this subject, the present chapter
argues that the object of artistic presentation need not, in
Beckett’s philosophical rendering, exist independently of artistic
perception; or as the 1964 Film has it (via Berkeley) ‘to be is to
be perceived’.

This article explores Beckett's use of "abstraction." The concept of ab-

straction in Beckett’s work has previously been considered by, to name only
a few, Eric Tonning, who in Samuel Beckett’s Abstract Drama delineates
the complexity of Beckett’s attitude to the concept; and by Pascale Casa-
252 SOFIA PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW

nova who in Anatomy of a Literary Revolution introduces Beckett

l’abstracteur to suggest that Beckett’s decision to write about the impossi-
bility of writing is a formalist solution to a technical problem.1 However, the
phenomenological aspect of his solution has been relatively little discussed.
In the postmodern context, we use our minds to construct and reconstruct
the world and ourselves. In other words, the world is mere appearance and
identity has crumbled to pieces that can never make up a whole. Whatever
identity we may construct is a bricolage in which no “presence” may en-
dure. To Beckett, however, the mind’s grasp of reality is inherently fictive
and the very concept of meaning is therefore blurred. What is thematized in
Beckett’s abstractions is not “reality” but “irreality,”2 that is, not the “truth”
about reality represented in language, but the extent to which reality, as we
perceive it, is frequently unintelligible, vague or unclear. To Beckett, ab-
straction is a methodological effort to overcome the problem of expression:
a problem evolving out of the awareness of the role of perception in experi-
ence. More specifically, it is the thematization of experience and perception
that allows Beckett’s abstractions to appear. In effect, Beckett turns to ab-
straction as a “solution” to the problem of expression, well aware that the
problem needs to be reformulated.
The problem of expression as it occurs in Beckett relates both to the
problem of mimesis and to the spurious positing of the expression as a me-
diating entity between phenomena and the mind. Already in his 1934 review
“Recent Irish Poetry,” Beckett identifies a “rupture in the lines of communi-
cation” and suggests that “the artist who is aware of this may state the space
that intervenes between him and the world of objects ... as no-man’s-land,
1
See also Germaine Bree, "Beckett's Abstractors of Quintessence” (The French Review,
36 (1963), 572-6); Garin Dowd, Abstract Machines: Samuel Beckett and Philosophy
After Deleuze and Guattari (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007)
2
The term “irreality” is here used in the sense introduced by Maurice Natanson in The
Erotic Bird: Phenomenology in Literature. Drawing on Husserl’s explication of eidetic
intuition, Natanson refers to the manner in which the “reality” of the world appears to
consciousness as “meant” only to suggest that these meanings are essentially fictive.
What presents itself to consciousness in the natural attitude, does so “within what
Husserl calls the ‘irreality’ of the world: the fictive universe of intentional conscious-
ness, the world as meant”. (The Erotic Bird: Phenomenology in Literature [Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1998], 20).
BECKETT AND ABSTRACTION 253

Hellespont or vacuum, according as he happens to be feeling resentful, nos-

3
talgic or merely depressed.” The problem of expression is here reformu-
lated to concern not the problem of mimesis, not the identity of phenomena
or meaning, but the meaning-making process itself.
Beckett’s “solution” has a formal as well as a methodological dimension
– formal, because language as the medium of expression in itself is form, and
methodological because it concerns the mode of presentation more than the
object of perception. It is Beckett’s frustration with words that impels the ef-
fort to find a “solution” to the problem of expression. Although Beckett’s ex-
plicit desire “to create a literature of the unword” (Disjecta, 173) may be un-
derstood as a desire to do away with words as such, this contribution to
Beckett/Philosophy will go on to suggest that it is, rather, the belief in lan-
guage as a shaping force that is sought to be dethroned in Beckett’s fiction.4
“Paradoxically,” Beckett explains in an interview with Charles Juliet, “it is
through form that the artist may find some kind of a way out. By giving form
5
to formlessness.” The supreme task for the artist becomes, in Beckett’s view,
“to find a form that accommodates the mess.”6
The term “abstract” generally refers to a concept derived from percep-
tion of the visible, concrete world. For example, the geometrical concept of
a circle takes its departure from a tangible form in the world, i.e. a round
thing. According to Michel Henry, “Mondrian’s or Malevich’s pure abstrac-
tion is precisely a geometrical abstraction, an abstraction which comes from

3
In the review “Recent Irish Poetry,” Beckett identifies “the breakdown of the object,
whether current, historical, mythical or spook” as the “new thing that has happened, or
the old thing that has happened again,” Beckett wrote this review under the pseudo-
nym Andrew Belis. It appeared first in The Bookman in 1934, but has subsequently
been reprinted in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, edited
by Ruby Cohn (London: Calder, 1983), 70–76.
4
Admittedly, language, since Saussure, is not only words but also includes other signs,
such as for example, body language.
5
Charles Juliet, Conversations With Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde, trans. Tracy
Cooke, Axel Nesme, Janey Tucker, Morgaine Reinl and Aude Jeanson (Champaign
and London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2009), 24.
6
Tom Driver, in “Columbia University Forum,” in Samuel Beckett: The Critical
Heritage, ed. Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman (London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1979), 219.
254 SOFIA PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW

the world and gets its nature from the world while at the same time seeking
to formulate its essence.”7 By contrast, the object of Kandinsky’s painting is
not a concrete phenomenon of the world, but his own feelings.8 To Kandin-
sky, the abstract content which art seeks to express is invisible because
“[t]rue reality is invisible, [and] our radical subjectivity is this reality”
(Henry, 21). Kandinsky’s notion of the “abstract” therefore constitutes a
break with traditional understandings of art by positing the abstract in the
subjectively experienced, affective realm of life, rather than in opposition to
the concrete world (Henry, 12-21).
Like Kandinsky, Beckett recognizes that what is given in experience is
something completely different from concepts and ideas. In an interview
with John Gruen, republished in Vogue in December 1969 following the
award of the Nobel Prize, Beckett claims to “perhaps” having found a way
to escape the dilemma of mimetic presentation:
I think perhaps I have freed myself from certain formal
concepts. Perhaps, like the composer Schoenberg or the painter
Kandinsky, I have turned toward an abstract language. Unlike
them, however, I have tried not to concretize the abstraction–not
9
to give it yet another formal context.

While Beckett sympathizes with Kandinsky’s project, he is also highly

critical of its subjectivist stance: “[t]he problem with Kandinsky’s art for
Beckett lies in what he sees as the painter’s incipient attempt to transcend
the ‘rupture of the lines of communication’ between subject and object alto-

7
Michel Henry, Seeing the Invisible: On Kandinsky, trans. Scott Davidson (London:
Continuum, 2009), 21.
8
According to Henry, Kandinsky’s notion of the abstract grew out of the combined in-
fluence of the intense aesthetic experience of “seeing Monet’s haystacks at the 1896
Moscow exhibition,” and the lesson learned from reading Niels Bohr, namely, that
“the physical reality has no substance and in some way no reality; quanta of energy
move in leaps without crossing through it” (15).
9
Quoted in Lois Oppenheim, The Painted Word: Samuel Beckett’s Dialogue with Art
(Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 126.
BECKETT AND ABSTRACTION 255

gether, leading him to a plane of fantasy.”10 Despite the fact that abstraction
in Beckett’s work bears an affinity to the notion of the abstract in Kandin-
sky’s work – both grasp the role of perception in aesthetic experience and
both emphasize the breakdown of the object – unlike Kandinsky, Beckett’s
use of abstraction does not sustain belief in any kind of truth.
On the contrary, much of Beckett’s work suggests that the human con-
11
dition is inexplicable: “[w]e cannot know and we cannot be known.” For
Beckett, “art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear and
does not make clear” (Disjecta, 94). Clarity or intelligibility, therefore, ei-
ther of perception or expression, seemingly, is not the aim of Beckett’s liter-
ary effort. In an interview with Tom Driver, Beckett speaks of an art that al-
lows obscurity, suggesting that where ambiguity prevails art “is unexplain-
able, and there art raises questions that it does not attempt to answer”
12
(Driver, 220). However, in the light of Beckett’s literary use of abstrac-
tion, the emphasis on ambiguity should not be taken at face value. High-
lighting ambiguity does not necessarily mean that a work is obscure and un-
intelligible. Rather, as Beckett’s own work testifies, ambiguity is as visible
as any other phenomenon.
Beckett’s literary thematization of perception bears a strong similarity
to the phenomenological investigation of human experience.13
The focus of the phenomenological attitude is to look at phenomena as
they appear to perception from different angles, shades and aspects, in order
to be able to see the manifold ways in which the phenomenon appears. The

10
Erik Tonning, Samuel Beckett’s Abstract Drama: Works for Stage and Screen, 1962-
1985 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), 67. The quotation is from Disjecta, 70.
11
Samuel Beckett, “Proust” and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (London: Cal-
der, 1999), 66.
12
In the same interview with Tom Driver, Beckett contrasts the ambiguity of his work
with the clarity found in the classical drama: “the destiny of Racine’s Phèdre is sealed
from the beginning: she will proceed into the dark. As she goes, she herself will be il-
luminated. At the beginning of the play she has partial illumination and at the end she
has complete illumination, but there has been no question that she moves toward the
dark” (220).
13
“Phenomenology is the study of human experience and of the way things present
themselves to us in and through such experience” (Robert Sokolowski, Introduction to
Phenomenology [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000], 2).
256 SOFIA PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW

conviction that pervades the non-phenomenological or so-called “natural at-

titude” is “one of belief” (Sokolowski, 45). By contrast, the phenomenologi-
cal attitude requires a suspension of belief. What is under scrutiny in the
phenomenological attitude is how belief is constituted. Appearances, beliefs,
practices, etc., are thematized and reflected on, not so as to deny them, but
to clarify them. The thematization can be described as an “irrealization” or
“reduction” (50) of the world of the natural attitude, which enables the phe-
nomenologist “to preserve the reality of the thing itself [and] not turn the
identity of the object into one of the ‘mere’ appearances” (50). Implicit in
this view is also a questioning of the philosophical understanding of con-
sciousness as internal to the mind and meaning as subjectively constituted.
Meaning is not a phenomenon in the mind, whether in the artist’s or in the
spectator’s, but appears as an identity in the manifold ways in which a phe-
nomenon appears to be perceived.
Beckett was well acquainted with the tenets of phenomenology and al-
ready in 1938 he had read Husserl’s work Ideas, a work of “critical impor-
tance” to him.14 He was also aware of the work of contemporary phenome-
nological philosophers such as Sartre, whose work The Psychology of
Imagination was published around the same time, and which also empha-
sized the role of perception as reinforcing the reality of phenomena as enti-
ties of the world rather than intrinsic to the subjective mind. It is with re-
spect to the significance given to the many ways of appearing of phenomena
and the thematization of perception that Beckett’s phenomenological atti-
tude is most obvious. Essentially, it is this ‘phenomenological attitude’ that
impels Beckett’s literary use of abstraction.
According to Matthew Feldman, Beckett’s writing underwent a “phe-
nomenological turn” (Feldman, 14) starting with the post-war novel Watt
and continuing throughout his career Beckett. In a manner similar to Watt, it
seems that Beckett is not concerned with what a thing is, in reality, but with
what it appears to be, in reality. Sitting at the train station, Watt perceives a
figure in the distance, too far away for him to be able to really discern with
clarity “what it was, coming along the road,” and whose approach Watt at
first awaits impatiently, only to suddenly realize:

14
Matthew Feldman, Beckett and Phenomenology (London: Continuum, 2009), 17.
BECKETT AND ABSTRACTION 257

that it was not necessary, not at all necessary, that the figure
should draw very near indeed, but that a moderate proximation
would be more than sufficient. For Watt’s concern, deep as it ap-
peared, was not after all with what the figure was, in reality, but
with what the figure appeared to be, in reality. For since when
were Watt’s concerns with what things were, in reality?15

The descriptions of Watt’s “reality,” in this case a vague perception of a

distant figure, constitutes precisely what Beckett set out to find, namely a
methodological solution within which to accommodate the chaotic and highly
ambiguous and inexplicable aspects of being. In phenomenological philoso-
phy, as in Beckett’s literary abstractions, it is not the actual but the apparent
that is at issue. Although not a philosopher, it would appear that Beckett owes
a debt to phenomenology, both in terms of the understanding of perception
and in terms of his use of abstraction as a methodological solution.
Essentially, Beckett’s literary use of abstraction to thematize experi-
ence can be found in all of his writing. In all texts, there is a strong focus on
the way things appear to be perceived by the characters. However, because
of the limited scope of this article, I shall focus on one particular text that
will serve as an example of Beckett’s use of abstraction. The short story
“One Evening” is a good illustration of Beckett’s “phenomenological turn”
and I have chosen to discuss one single text in greater depth instead of gen-
eralizing about several texts.
In “One Evening,” an old woman’s coming out at sunset is carefully
crafted so as to describe what is given in experience – rendering both the
“messy” quality of her perceptions and how these perceptions become tenta-
tively meaningful to her, and to the reader. Coming out in search of yellow
flowers, she stumbles on the body of a man lying spreadeagled on the
ground: “He was found lying on the ground. No one had missed him. No
one was looking for him. An old woman found him. To put it vaguely. It
happened so long ago. She was straying in search of wild flowers. Yellow

15
Samuel Beckett, Watt, edited by Édouard Magessa O’Reilly (London: Faber, 2009), 196.
258 SOFIA PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW

only. With no eyes but for these she stumbled on him lying there.”16 The
woman’s experience of the world is a mixture of presence and absence –
one where any actuality is consistently layered with many possible mean-
ings, “[t]o put it vaguely” (119). The actual is thus only one contingent as-
pect within a temporal horizon of experience.
The event of the woman’s finding the man is described as “the shock
of her foot against a body” (121). The narrative description of her experi-
ence reflects the way in which phenomena appear to her. The woman does
not see the body lying on the ground but notices this “fact” only as she ex-
periences the shock of her foot against a body. The description underlines
the way in which phenomena appear to the natural attitude. The woman ex-
periences her own foot, her own body. The body of another, the man lying
there, only provides the context within which her own body “dys-appears”
as an irksome presence.17 The woman’s perception of the man, then, grasps
directly the meaning of the experience in a precise way; her own body
comes to the foreground. The narrative description of the woman’s percep-
tion of the world constitutes a suspension or “bracketing” of the natural atti-
tude, allowing the reader to see beyond the woman’s experience of her own
body, to take in also the sunset, the flowers and the body of the man on the
ground as the context within which her body appears.
Beckett’s focus on the world as experienced reveals a phenomenologi-
cal structure immanent to the formulation of its “coming to givenness.” 18
For example, the notion of identity is given as a structure that prevails be-

16
Samuel Beckett, “One Evening,” in Company/Ill Seen Ill Said/Worstward Ho/Stirrings
Still, edited by Dirk Van Hulle (London: Faber, 2009), 119.
17
In The Absent Body (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), Drew Leder con-
vincingly argues that while “in one sense the body is the most abiding and inescapable
presence in our lives, it is also essentially characterized by absence” (1). However, al-
though the body is absent from everyday performance of habitual acts, it nevertheless
“dys-appears” when there occurs a disruption of sorts, as for example when a move-
ment is dysfunctional or when we are in pain. The concept of “dys-appearance,” thus,
refers to the thematization of the body in “times of dysfunction or problematic opera-
tion” (85).
18
The term “coming to givenness” should here be taken in the phenomenological sense,
referring to the way in which the world presents itself, or appears, in and through per-
ception.
BECKETT AND ABSTRACTION 259

yond the self’s manifold ways of appearing. This can be seen in the way the
woman’s shadow “irks her. So much so that she turns to face the sun” (120).
In order to escape the confusion of having “another” self, the old woman
turns her face to the sunlight, trying to obliterate the irksome shadow which
she cannot otherwise escape – similar to Buster Keaton’s character in the
Berkeleyan Film, scrabbling to avoid the camera – but she has to tread care-
fully because any movement away from the light means the obliteration of
her transient freedom. Thus, she “moves with half-closed eyes as if drawn
on into the glare,” and “craves for sundown to end and to stray freely again”
(121, 120). The thematization of presence means that the simple act of walk-
ing in the field at sunset stands out against the double background of self
and non-self. However, more importantly, it reveals the woman’s recogni-
tion of her own identity through the various appearances of self. Identity is
here shown “beyond the dimension of appearances, as something presented
through them all, and through other possible appearances as well” (Soko-
lowski, 30). The manifold appearances of “self” now allow the vagueness
and ambiguity of identity to appear in a way that approximates the phe-
nomenological suspension of belief in reality, in order to “distinguish the
object from its appearances” (Sokolowski, 50). Although this does not mean
that Beckett is conducting a phenomenological investigation into the struc-
ture of consciousness, the description of the woman’s perception of self is a
thematization in abstracto of the structure of experience.
What primarily concerns Beckett is not that “reality” is being misrep-
resented in literature, but that “reality,” as it appears in perception, and as it
is conveyed via language, is perceived in a state of utter confusion: “‘The
confusion is not my invention. We cannot listen to a conversation for five
minutes without being acutely aware of the confusion. It is all around us and
our only chance now is to let it in. The only chance of renovation is to open
our eyes and see the mess. It is not a mess you can make sense of’” (Driver,
218). The problem of presentation in language therefore concerns the way in
which language ultimately transforms and shapes perception.
The descriptions of the man on the ground and the woman poised be-
side him, in a manner similar to an abstract painting, emphasizes the colours
and spatial relations of the tableau:
260 SOFIA PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW

He lay face downward and arms outspread. He wore a

greatcoat in spite of the time of year. Hidden by the body a long
row of buttons fastened it all the way down. Buttons of all shapes
and sizes. Worn upright the skirts swept the ground. That seems
to hang together. Near the head a hat lay askew on the ground. At
once on its brim and crown. He lay inconspicuous in the greenish
coat. To catch an eye searching from afar there was only the
white head. May she have seen him somewhere before? Some-
where on his feet before? Not too fast. (119, emphasis added)

Despite the emphasis placed on the points and lines of the tableau, the
narrator’s comments– “That seems to hang together ... Not too fast”– inter-
mittently suspend the flow of the story and consistently signal to the reader
an awareness of the process of interpretation that a painting, perhaps, would
not include quite as explicitly.
The narrative voice suggests that the man’s actual position on the
ground, hiding the long row of buttons fastened all the way down, seems to
hang together with an imagined upright position, where the skirts of the coat
would sweep the ground in a manner parallel to the woman’s skirt. The de-
scription introduces a third dimension of perception to allow the long row of
buttons, now hidden, as well as the length of the coat to appear. Again a
blend of absence and presence prevails in the description of the situation, al-
lowing the ambiguity of the presentation to appear. What can be made of the
fact that the greatcoat, “fastened all the way down” with buttons of “all
shapes and sizes” would sweep the ground if the man were in an upright po-
sition? Is the man dead or will he be able to continue walking? Is there a
bond between the man and the woman, or does the imagined position of the
man’s coat sweeping the grass, suggest a memory of a different time?
Rather than concretizing the expression, the thematization of the bodies’ dif-
ferent positions is suggestive of the possibilities of interpretation that appear
through the manifold ways of appearing.
Yet another perspective is included when the narrator introduces an
imagined third party’s perspective of the old woman standing next to the
body on the ground, which also seems to hang together:
BECKETT AND ABSTRACTION 261

Were a third party to chance that way theirs were the only
bodies he would see. First that of the old woman standing. Then
on drawing near it lying on the ground. That seems to hang
together. The deserted fields. The old woman all in black stock-
still. The body stock-still on the ground. Yellow at the end of the
black arm. The white hair in the grass (120, emphasis added).

The introduction of “a third party” implies a perspective similar to the

reader’s. This can further be seen as an illustration of how presence and ab-
sence permeate our intuitive acts. As readers, we are now intending the fic-
tive situation, the absence as presence, as well as the act of “intending”19
this situation. We are reflecting in abstracto on the presentation. Clearly a
“reduction” is taking place. Not, however, simply through a minimalistic
emphasis on form and style, but in the sense that the reader is being asked to
suspend belief in the “reality” of the fictive world described.
Similarly, the prescriptive yet ambiguous phrase, “not too fast,” which
is repeated twice in “One Evening” acts as a meta-textual signal that invites
the reader to abide in the moment of description with its suggestion that all
possibilities of meaning have not yet been satisfactorily recorded or ex-
plored. Each intermission becomes a discriminating moment, thematizing
different objects of attention such as the woman or the weather:

Not too fast. She was all in black. The hem of her long
black skirt trailed in the grass. […] Not too fast. The weather. Sky
overcast all day till evening. In the west-north-west near the verge
already the sun came out at last. Rain? A few drops if you will. A
few drops if you will (119, 120, emphases added).

The narrative voice’s question and answer suggests that there is an on-
going process of evaluation, one in which the narrator assumes the reader’s

19
In phenomenology, the concept of “intentionality” is central. “The core doctrine in
phenomenology is the teaching that every act of consciousness we perform, every ex-
perience we that we have is intentional: it is essentially ‘consciousness of’ or an ‘ex-
perience of’ something or other ... Every act if consciousness, every experience, is cor-
related with an object. Every intending has its intended object” (Sokolowski, 8).
262 SOFIA PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW

potential disbelief. The idiom “if you will” is ambiguous. It both allows the
narrator to escape commitment and emphasizes the sense of a phenomenol-
ogical “perhaps” in the text.
The blend of absence and presence that prevail in “One Evening” is
shown through descriptions of the old woman’s experience. Phrases like
“[s]he remarks with surprise the absence of lambs in great numbers here at
this time of year” (120) are further evocative of the woman’s intuiting ab-
sence as a presence. Technically, the moment of experience cannot be con-
sidered in itself because an experience cannot occur out of context (Soko-
lowski, 24). It is a moment existing “only as blended with [its] complemen-
tary parts” (Sokolowski, 24). Yet, the thematization of perception through
language allows Beckett to discriminate and analyze aspects of perception
otherwise taken for granted. The description of the old woman’s experience
thus blends with the description of the situation to indicate the divide be-
tween the way in which phenomena appear to be perceived and the manifold
meanings they may present. The thematization of phenomena and situations,
therefore, reflects the way the theme of “perhaps” permeates Beckett’s crea-
tive work. The very same “perhaps,” as Feldman points out, is central to the
“methodology of phenomenological reduction.”20 If anything, then,
Beckett’s understanding and use of abstraction is phenomenological.
Ultimately, what Beckett seeks is a “new form” in literature, one that
“admits the chaos and does not try to say that the chaos is something else”
(Driver, 219). Beckett finds this “form,” for lack of a better term, through
the use of abstraction. Beckett’s persistent exploration of the structures of
perception should, however, not be seen as an effort to “explain” the world
in terms of clear and precise representations. Instead, as Beckett himself
suggested: “life is to be seen, to be talked about, [but] the way it is to be
lived cannot be stated unambiguously but must come as a response to that
which one encounters in ‘the mess’” (Driver, 223). The power of Beckett’s
literature to present “the mess” lies precisely in setting the stage for poten-
tial meanings to appear.

20
Matthew Feldman, “I Inquired Into Myself: Beckett, Interpretation, Phenomenology?”
in Samuel Beckett Today/ Aujourd’hui,12 (2002), ed. Marius Buning, Matthijs Engel-
berts, Sjef Houppermans (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), 229.
BECKETT AND ABSTRACTION 263

Importantly, Beckett’s presentations of the old woman’s perceptions

as experience, does not form a window through which we may perceive her
world more clearly or “accurately.” Nor do the descriptions of her experi-
ence reveal the “truth” about the reality of any kind of world ― neither “the
world” defined as the context in which the literary work is read or written,
nor the literary work as a “world unto itself,” providing its own context.
Beckett does not present a phenomenological rendering of the woman’s
world; rather, his work converges with phenomenology in that the narrative
experience of her world is constituted as given in such and such a way. Cor-
respondingly, it is through his writing’s positing of the world as experienced
that Beckett evokes the irreal in the real. This is the way that Beckett finds
to mock words with words, not by suggesting that they do not mean any-
thing, but by showing how ambiguous and unreliable they are; and conse-
quently, how ambiguous and unreliable any description of a perception must
be, given that it coalesces with the natural attitude.
In Beckett’s literary use of abstraction, it is the meaning-making
process itself that is thematized. The abstractions we find in Beckett’s
work shed light on the extent to which our perception of the world is irreal.
Irrealization, or thematization of the natural attitude, is in this sense, abstrac-
tion, and phenomena that are put into relief ― for example, in “One Eve-
ning,” the descriptions of the white head, the yellow flowers, the green coat,
the body on the ground, the woman, her irksome black shadow, the sun, the
weather, the rain, presence, absence, and so on ― are thematized to show
that meaning is not a phenomenon in the mind, whether in the artist’s or in
the spectator’s, but appears as an identity in the manifold ways in which a
phenomenon appears to be perceived. The thematization of the different
phenomena also reveals how perception entails perceiving beyond the
shades, aspects, or profiles of its multiple appearances. Although it may be
argued that literature always seeks to illuminate the way we perceive the
world, in Beckett’s fiction the reality of the world is posited as inherently
fictional. Perception of the world cannot convey “truth,” or knowledge of
truth no matter how “true” the perception is, but “the art of fiction may tell
264 SOFIA PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW

21
us the truth about the fictions natural to the mind.”
Paradoxically, it is language that enables Beckett to use the method of
abstraction to reflect on human experience. It is by means of language that
Beckett is able to describe the manifold ways in which phenomena appear to
be perceived by the characters. The thematization of experience allows the
gap between perception and meaning to appear and the descriptive reflection
on the characters’ perceptual reality then constitutes moments of experience
taken in abstracto. It is Beckett’s essentially phenomenological effort to de-
scribe the structures of experience without falling prey to the fallacy of try-
ing to explain that impels his abstractions. Rather than imparting some kind
of truth about this world, therefore, Beckett’s fictions and their descriptions
make manifest that, since the mind’s perception of the world is inherently
artful, “truth” in the philosophical sense of the word is unattainable. All that
can be hoped for is to “fail better.”

21
George Santayana, quoted in Natanson, Erotic Bird, 4.