The Ideal Real: Beckett's Fiction and ImaginationFairleigh Dickinson Univ Press, 1994 - 265 páginas The Beckett heroes, whose experiences are discussed in this book, were conditioned by a "humanistic" education much like Beckett's; but they come to find that the self they were taught to see as their own is nonexistent. Having nothing in their acquired personality to cope with this crisis, Murphy, Molloy, Moran, Malone, and all that follow find themselves dying to their old self, to everything a Western liberal education could think of as self. Early on, Beckett saw clues to the situation in the work of Jung, the "mind doctor" who represented the opposite of the empirical tradition. Jung, like the esoteric schools, saw a potential human whose development was sometimes delayed or prevented by the very system the claimed to "educate" and "civilize" the personality. The existence of this potential self has been doubted by many modern thinkers, but Beckett's stories show "a soul denied in vain" since it is the enabler of all speech, whether apparently denying or affirming. |
Índice
| 9 | |
| 17 | |
Trusty Things? More Pricks Than Kicks Murphy | 27 |
Laughing at the Referent Watt Mercier and Camier | 43 |
Lies in the Trilogy Molloy Malone Dies | 61 |
The You That Is Not You How It | 92 |
Fancy and Imagination in the Rotunda All Strange | 131 |
Exits for Amateurs of Myth Imagination Dead | 151 |
The Imagination of Youth Company | 182 |
10 | 190 |
Disembodying Western Tradition Stirrings Still | 226 |
Conclusion | 235 |
Becketts Blake Riddle | 242 |
Bibliography | 254 |
Index | 261 |
Imagination Living From an Abandoned Work | 169 |
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Palavras e frases frequentes
azure Barfield Beckett's fiction Beckett's New Worlds Beckett's prose become Blake bones Brienza chapter cliché Coleridge Coleridge's Company consciousness critics dark dawn described doors of perception essay eye of flesh fact faint fancy habit human Ill Seen Ill images Imagination Dead Imagine italics John Calder knowledge language less light linguistic literary London Lost lyrical Malone Malone Dies matter meaning memory Mercier and Camier metafictional mind Molloy Murphy narrative narrator narrator's ness never night novel objects Old Earth ooze Owen Barfield passage perception perhaps phrase physical poetic poetry Press Pricks Than Kicks Proust quaqua reader reality reference relation relationship Romanticism Rotunda texts Samuel Beckett scene sense sentence silence skull sound speak speech Stirrings story Strange suggests things thought tion tone trilogy truth University Unnamable vision voice Watt Watt's words Wordsworth Worstward Worstward Ho writing
Passagens conhecidas
Página 239 - If the labours of Men of science should ever create any material revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition, and in the impressions which we habitually receive, the Poet will sleep then no more than at present; he will be ready to follow the steps of the Man of Science, not only in those general indirect effects, but he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of the science itself.
Página 155 - If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.
Página 240 - Reason is the enumeration of quantities already known; imagination is the perception of the value of those quantities, both separately and as a whole.
Página 86 - All these Murphys, Molloys and Malones do not fool me. They have made me waste my time, suffer for nothing, speak of them when, in order to stop speaking, I should have spoken of me and of me alone.
Página 240 - ACCORDING TO one mode of regarding those two classes of mental action, which are called reason and imagination, the former may be considered as mind contemplating the relations borne by one thought to another, however produced; and the latter, as mind acting upon those thoughts so as to colour them with its own light, 'and composing from them as from elements, other thoughts, each containing within itself the principle of its own integrity.
Página 236 - I see, indeed, in the arts of every country those faint lights and faint colours and faint outlines and faint energies which many call 'the decadence,' and which I, because I believe that the arts lie dreaming of things to come, prefer to call the autumn of the body.
Página 212 - We are led to believe a lie When we see not thro' the eye, Which was born in a night, to perish in a night, When the Soul slept in beams of light. God appears...
Página 236 - Man has wooed and won the world, and has fallen weary, and not, I think, for a time, but with a weariness that will not end until the last autumn, when the stars shall be blown away like withered leaves.
Página 113 - But from his ignorance of them he drew a kind of joy, as from all that went to swell the murmur, You are a simpleton. But he loved the flight of the hawk and could distinguish it from all others. He would stand rapt, gazing at the long pernings, the quivering poise, the wings lifted for the plummet drop, the wild reascent, fascinated by such extremes of need, of pride, of patience and solitude.