And so we make a new beginning, each for himself and in himself, with the decision of

philosophers who begin radically: that at first we shall put out of action all the convictions we
have been accepting up to now, including all our sciences.
- Edmund Husserl (1859-1938)

A fictional technique always relates back to the novelists metaphysics. The critics task is to
define the latter before evaluating the former.
- Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) [1]

I.

Curious, one might think, that the linking school of thought, or ism, for these two versatile
writers in the title above is not existentialism but phenomenology; and more specifically,
Husserlian phenomenology, as shall presently become clear. Arguably, at the height of their
respective notoriety in the 1960s that decade when Sartre famously and authentically
declined the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964, while Beckett accepted the annual award
quietly and by proxy five years later the two were often viewed as novelist-philosophers par
excellence, pioneers of a literature of authenticity, perhaps even proponents of a theatre of
the absurd. John Cruickshank, for example, introducing his edited The Novelist as Philosopher
in 1962, had already noted that

their fundamental philosophical theories are present in their work by implication only. The
ideas belong to the works of pure philosophy; certain consequences of these ideas are alone
worked out in fictional form . a striking synthesis is achieved which preserves the strictness
of the philosophy while not weakening the art by obstructive didacticism, but it is a synthesis
obtained at the readers expense. (13)

To the aid of such floundering readers progressively appeared an army of literary critics, who
interpreted both Sartres and Becketts literary uvres as a form of existential fiction.
Needless to say, great justification may be attached to this characterization of Sartre, author of
the 1943 Being and Nothingness and the 1945 Existentialism and Humanism, those seminal
manifestos of existentialist doctrine whereby, famously, existence precedes essence. This is
not to marginalize Heideggers importance here to the development of existentialist thought
even if his chasing after Being separates Heidegger from other philosophers of the everyday
and arguably paved the way for his catastrophic support for Nazism, as I have posited
elsewhere.[2] Whatever the case, if Sartre is regarded as a founding voice of existentialist
philosophy, then it follows that his formidable artistic output of novels, plays and short stories

may be profitably viewed as demonstrations of what Cruickshank termed his fundamental

philosophical theories.

Yet the protagonist of this article, Samuel Beckett, did not expound fundamental
philosophical theories, did not work in pure philosophy, and did not adhere to any readily
recognizable form of philosophical strictness his was a body of disjecta, of fatigue and
disgust, as the Addenda to Watt puts it. For Beckett wrote no explicitly philosophical
treatises, made few public statements which were anyway far more notable for their opacity
than their didacticism and moreover, Beckett was an artist whose writing can be easily seen
as two long, sustained fingers to the systematizing and logical processes intrinsic to Western
philosophy. Taking one contemporaneous example from Becketts short fiction, All Strange
Away begins Imagination dead imagine. Presumably, this is not the type of imagination
advocated by Sartres first freelance book of philosophy, Gallimards 1940 L'imaginaire :
psychologie phnomnologique de l'imagination (translated as The Imaginary: A
Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination). And far from presenting any interpretative
foothold for a given philosophy let alone existentialism Becketts text offers only uncertain
statements in neither first nor third person, offering no recognizable place nor time; indeed,
All Strange Away offers an extended description of a diagram that seems to undermine its
own status as prose literature:

No real image but say like red no grey say like something grey and when again squeeze firm
down five second say faint hiss then silence then back loose two seconds and say faint pop and
so arrive though no true image at small grey punctured rubber ball or small grey ordinary
rubber bulb such as on earth attached to bottle of scent or suchlike that when squeezed a jet
of scent but here alone. So little by little all strange away. Avalanche white lava mud seethe lid
over eye permitting return to face of which finally only that it could be nothing else, all right.
(Beckett 1995, 169)

Only a few years earlier, in the mid-1950s precisely when Beckett was published as stating I
cant see any trace of a system anywhere (Beckett to Israel Shenker, qtd. in Graver, Lawrence
and Federman, 149) Sartre was already fitting Becketts literature into his own, nowpolitically revolutionary, fundamental philosophical theories. In several interviews translated
and collected in the 1976 Sartre on Theater, he repeatedly coupled Beckett with Eugene
Ionesco (alongside other writers of the absurd) in brief references to Waiting for Godot as a
form of bourgeois theater; that is, drama which is profoundly, essentially, bourgeois in
content:

Take Beckett. I like Waiting for Godot very much. I go so far as to regard it as the best thing
that has been done in the theatre for thirty years. But all the themes in Godot are bourgeois
solitude, despair, the platitude, incommunicability. All of them are a product of the inner
solitude of the bourgeoisie. And it matters little what Godot may be God or the Revolution.
[] What counts is that Godot does not come because of the heroes inner weakness; that he
cannot come because of their sin, because men are like that. (qtd. in Contat and Rybalka, 51)

The same faint praise is extended to Endgame in two further references to Beckett over the
next five years, again, as part of Sartres larger analysis of bourgeois theatre through the lens
of his increasingly idiosyncratic, philosophical post-Stalinism.

In a lecture to a German audience in 1966, Sartre credited Beckett with helping to

revolutionize postwar European theatre. In a statement echoing Becketts own sentiments on
a putative Theatre of the Absurd, which was inappropriate for him because the absurd
implies value judgments (Beckett, qtd. in Juliet, 149), Sartre claimed that the theater of the
absurd is itself absurd, because none of them regards human life and the world as an absurdity
even Beckett, about whom I shall have more to say a little later. But more is an
overstatement, and Sartres promissory note instead turns out instead to be a subtle evasion,
one dressed in an unusual anecdote. For in this lecture, Beckett is dragooned into being the
spokesperson of the enfants terribles in French drama, an artist attempting to shock the
audience for an audience ought not to accept a play until after they have been shocked to
the core specifically, shocked into a relaxation of inhibitions. Sartre, in this lecture,
continues, I believe that Beckett was speaking for all of them when he exclaimed as he heard
the whole audience frantically applauding the first night of Waiting for Godot, My God, there
must be something wrong, it isnt possible, theyre applauding it! (qtd. in Contat and Rybalka,
135, 156)

In short, Sartres sketch is one of modernist defamiliarization on steroids. Or instead, if you

like, Beckett may be seen to offer an anticipatory postmodern exercise in self-referential and
deconstructive writing. Remaining momentarily with the former, Anglophone literary critics
including Martin Esslin. Ruby Cohn, Michael Robinson, Richard Coe, Hugh Kenner and several
others inflected Becketts writing with existential theories, so essential to founding
Anglophone Beckett Studies during the 1960s. Broadly speaking, influential existential
readings of Becketts fiction were advanced both early and often. One paradigmatic example
to be considered more closely later on is Edith Kerns impressive 1970 Existential Thought and
Fictional Technique: Kierkegaard, Sartre, Beckett, which had argued during existential
criticisms heyday:

From its inception, existential thought has felt itself at home in fiction. Because of its intense
inwardness and the commitment of its proponents, it has expressed itself more strikingly in
imaginative writing than in non-fictional treatises. According to modern existentialist thinkers,
the paradox and absurdity of life can be more readily deduced from fundamental human
situations portrayed in fiction than described in the logical language of philosophy which is our
heritage. Existentialisms abhorrence of rigid thought systems as being alien to life and
existence has equally pointed toward a preference for poetry and fiction. (xiii)

Several additional studies may be included in this Beckettian existential feast as well, including
Cormier and Pallisters Waiting for Death (1976), John Fletchers Samuel Becketts Art (1969),
Hannah Copelands Art and the Artist in the Works of Samuel Beckett (1975), Lance St. John

Butlers Samuel Beckett and the Meaning of Being (1984), and Livio Dobrezs superb The
Existential and Its Exits (1982) all published within 10 years either way of Kerns work; that is,
at the height of existentialisms heyday. Clearly, the postwar popularity of existential
philosophy in Europe and the United States played no small part in fashionable readings of
Becketts uvre. Indeed, the desolation and uncertainty pervading the Beckettian world
appears to have reflected the picture Western civilization in fact wanted, or actually had, of
itself. That is to say, with both Auschwitz-Birkenau and Mutually Assured Destruction
themselves less than a decade apart, neither his fellow Irishmens Wildes wit nor Joyces
verbal gesticulations seemed appropriate to this era, one that Beckett had likened in 1946, in a
draft radio script entitled The Capital of the Ruins, to the time-honored conception of
humanity in ruins (Beckett 1995, 278). Time and again, we see an interpretative Zeitgeist at
work in the international reception of Samuel Beckett in the decades since 1945, with
Becketts postwar writings acting as a kind of fun-house mirror for contemporary society.

Yet as I argued in 2002, this critical reflection of cultural preferences cuts both ways
temporally, and embraces the latter, currently dominant trend in literary criticism, namely
poststructuralism.[3] While this consideration is chronologically peripheral to the unfolding
phenomenological discussion at hand, it is interesting to note the way in which postructuralist
readings of Beckett displaced then-dominant existentialist ones, just as the cultural turn was
signposted around Western universities from the about mid-1980s. This itself produced some
excellent accounts of Becketts work, including Steven Connors landmark Samuel Beckett:
Theory Repetition, Text (1988), Anthony Uhlmanns Beckett and Poststructuralism (1990) and
Carla Locatellis Unwording the World (1992), to name just a few. But importantly, it seems,
just like existentialisms patriarch, poststructuralisms own godfather was curiously tonguetied when it came to Becketts uvre. Strangely enough, the only reference to Beckett in
Jacques Derridas extensive canon occurs in an often-cited interview with Derek Attridge,
published in the latters 1992 Acts of Literature. As with previously paradigmatic existential
readings, Derridas view of Becketts self-deconstructive literature seems to suggest that, here
too, Beckett is the spokesperson for a movement still attempting to catch up with his legacy.
Put another way, for Derrida, Becketts literature has already anticipated the disconnected
communication, floating signifiers, and linguistic instability at the heart of deconstruction:

[Beckett] is an author to whom I feel very close, or to whom I would like to feel myself very
close; but also too close. Precisely because of this proximity, it is too hard for me, too easy and
too hard. I have perhaps avoided him a bit because of this identification. Too hard also
because he writes in my language, in a language which is his up to a point, mine up to a point
(for both of us it is a differently foreign language) texts which are both too close to me and
too distant for me to be able to respond to them. How could I write in French in the wake of
or with someone who does operations on this language which seem to be so strong and so
necessary, but which remain idiomatic? How could I write, sign, countersign performatively
texts which respond to Beckett? How could I avoid the platitude of a supposed academic
metalanguage? It is very hard. (Attridge, 60)

Interestingly, this is a far different kind of self-censorship, or evasion, than that offered by
Beckett on existentialism; in terms of his own engagement with contemporaneous philosophy,
Beckett was not to be pinned down by interlocutors in two familiar interviews from 1961:

Have contemporary philosophers had any influence on your thought?

I never read philosophers.
Why not?
I never understand anything they write.
All the same, people have wondered if the existentialists problem of being may afford a key to
your works.
Theres no key or problem. I wouldnt have had any reason to write my novels if I could have
expressed their subject in philosophic terms.
(to Gabriel DAubarde, 16 Feb. 1961, qtd in Graver and Federman, 217)

One cannot speak anymore of being, one must speak only of the mess. When Heidegger and
Sartre speak of a contrast between being and existence, they may be right, I dont know, but
their language is too philosophical for me. I am not a philosopher. One can only speak of what
is in front of him, and that now is simply the mess. (to Tom F. Driver, Summer 1961, qtd in
Graver and Federman, 219)

Here Beckett, characteristically, seems to throw more darkness than light on the matter. But
some disingenuous commentary is nevertheless still visible. In the specific case of Beckett and
Sartre, at least, the former certainly understood something of the latters philosophy. More to
the point, as is argued below, Sartres work helped to further revolutionize Becketts writing at
a specific, critical point in time, ironically putting him on track for Sartre to claim thirty years
later that Beckett had revolutionized the theater. Yet at this point and at the very least in
terms of the interviews cited above, as insightfully noted by Rubin Rabinovitz long ago, it might
be borne in mind that Samuel Beckett says in interviews that he knows little about philosophy;
but his little could easily be another mans abundance (qtd. in Porter and Brophy, 261).

A methodological aside closes this, the first of three sections forming Beckett, Sartre and
Phenomenology (via Husserl). For as suggested above, the international reception of Becketts
art may be considered mimetic of postwar interpretative priorities not just in the US and
Europe, but refreshingly, globally.[4] In terms of tracing out Becketts intellectual debts, this
would only seem to reinforce the heuristic value of falsifiable scholarship in establishing the
facts, yes, facts, underpinning any theoretical approach to Becketts writings. The very opacity
of Becketts literature, moreover, demands it. For this is an author that can be recruited to any
cause, any ism, any branding campaign, ranging from an Apple Beckett to a political Beckett.
The perspective offered here, centering on the relevance of theorizing from a position of
empirical accuracy is, in part, also powered by the absolutely enormous corpus of unpublished

material now available in manuscript, online and print media.[5] In short, new findings in the
archives are able to support empirically-grounded readings of Becketts work. This going back
to the archives, in fact, can help criticism to paradoxically advance; in this case, through the
prism of phenomenological interpretation of Becketts development between the writing of
Murphy and Watt.

Furthermore, the advancing of such falsifiable claims the utility of which was recently
debated in the Free Space section concluding Samuel Beckett Today/AujourdHui (SBT/A) 21
has the singular capacity to unravel important matters of artistic influence in modernist
literature. Interpretative claims first supported by evidence able to be refuted are no less valid
here than in other humanistic disciplines, similarly dedicated to advancing knowledge. The
case of the above views by three very different Left Bank (and left-wing) intellectuals aptly
illustrates the point. The interviews by Derrida, Sartre and Beckett cited above all reveal a
strange proximity and uncannily similar reticence toward one another, one crying out for
falsifiable disentanglement. To be sure, these intellectuals tackled what they variously
understood as the mess in divergent ways but divergent from what? Or whom?

II.

The short answer is Edmund Husserl, founder of phenomenology. Both existential humanism
and poststructuralism, those two dominant readings of Becketts uvre, are themselves part
of what Paul Ricoeur has called the heretical legacies of Husserlian phenomenology.[6] By
way of example, Jacques Derridas 1954 dissertation was entitled The Problem of Genesis in
Husserls Philosophy, while his first book, in 1962, introduced and translated Husserls Origin of
Geometry. Already twenty years earlier, Sartre had been introduced to Husserls ideas by
Raymond Aron, just back from studying abroad in Berlin during 1933. Aron had reported: this
glass, this table [] phenomenologists spoke of them philosophically. That was evidently
enough to make Sartre blanche, for he had been looking for a philosophy of the everyday to
structure his as-yet untitled novel (Cohen-Solal, 91). Thereafter, Sartre directed four years of
intensive study to exhaust Husserl (1984, 84), culminating in his breakthrough work, Nausea,
published in April 1937. Moving backward critically, as it were, may therefore offer a
paradoxical opening for phenomenology in terms of literary criticism. In Beckett studies at
least, such a revisiting of Husserlian phenomenology has remarkably few scholarly
antecedents. As this second section will empirically show, phenomenology may well have been
the decisive change between the interwar Murphy, the wartime Watt and the postwar Trilogy
(followed, of course, by the shock of the 1953 Parisian debut of Waiting for Godot (written
1949) that first established Becketts international recognition.

Interestingly, Beckett and Sartre actually knew each other in interwar France, thanks to
Alfred Pron. Pron had shared rooms with Sartre at the Ecole Normale Suprieure prior to
taking up a 2-year visiting lectureship in French literature at Becketts Alma Mater, Trinity
College, Dublin, between 1926 and 1928. At this time, Pron became the first of Becketts
deeply cerebral friendships contributing to what James Knowlson has called The Growth of a

Mind over the later 1920s (60, 65). (Those later filling this role in the artistic developments to
ensue in Becketts next twenty years extended to Jean Beaufret, Brian Coffey and Georges
Duthuit, in particular). Through Pron, Sartre and Beckett appear to have met at the point
when the latter accepted the inverse academic position held by Pron in T.C.D. two years
previously, becoming a visiting lecteur in English at the Ecole between 1928 and 1930. During
these years, Beckett also met a man destined to become his closest confidant, Thomas
MacGreevy, who Beckett succeeded at the Ecole and who had introduced both Beckett and
Pron to James Joyce in Paris (see Ackerley and Gontarski, 431-2). During this time, Pron and
Beckett translated the Anna Livia Plurabelle section of Work in Progress together, surely
attesting to their intimacy as friends. Moreover, a number of important features in Becketts
life and writing emerge at this point. Over the course of this first, extended Parisian sojourn,
Beckett met Sartre, Beaufret, MacGreevy and even Suzanne, his later partner; he moved into
the Joyce circle (if only briefly at this point, due to Lucia Joyces unfolding illness); and
importantly for present purposes, he produced his first published work in 1929,
DanteBruno.Vico..Joyce. Here, Becketts homage to what became Joyces Finnegans Wake
makes the earliest statement of the problem which was to vex Beckett over the next decade:
the subject-object relationship:

Here form is content, content is form. You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is
not written at all. It is not to be read or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at
and listened to. (1984, 27)

Indeed, it is this fence, this window, between form and content, between subjectivity and
objectivity or more technically, between individual perception and intersubjective reality
which phenomenology sought to overcome, as Sartre was to find over the mid-1930s. And
during these same years, a strikingly similar subject-object preoccupation was right at the
forefront of Becketts artistic mind. As Mark Nixon and Erik Tonning have fruitfully shown, the
very interplay of form and content which Beckett praised in Joyces Work in Progress was also
something of a thrown artistic gauntlet for Becketts own experimental poetics during the mid1930s. In Tonnings summation,

this method of dissonance aims to stage an encounter with what is alien to language from
within language; but this must by definition entail some residual form of continued
involvement in the phenomenal realm, and must re-enact in however attenuated a form
the division between subject and object. (47)

Thus over nearly a ten-year period, the problematical issue of this subject-object dissonance,
or to employ Mark Nixons important description, veil between word and world, was a central
challenge to Becketts artistic experimentation at the outset of his writing career.[7]

And then, on 26 May 1938 about halfway between the completion of Murphy and the
commencement of Watt Beckett wrote to Thomas MacGreevy, I have read Sartres Nause

& find it extraordinarily good. But you would not agree with me (2009, 626). Then, quite
possibly in order to pursue the philosophical-artistic rendering of subject-object synthesis
provided by that breakthrough novel, Beckett read Sartres 1936 Ecole dissertation, published
as LImagination, making three short entries into his vitally-important Whoroscope Notebook,
as John Pilling has painstakingly demonstrated (2004, 46). In turn, these jottings reveal that
Beckett likely read the whole of Sartres Imagination, which concludes with a lengthy critique
of Husserlian phenomenology, first introduced by Sartre through the celebrated maxim: a
consciousness is always consciousness of something (32). Thereafter, Sartre progressively
depicts Husserl as philosophically Herculean: destroying nearly every prior canon of Western
thought to have come before; and precisely doing so by unifying the subject-object relation
around Husserlian intentionality. In thus clearing the Augean stables of Western philosophy,
Becketts introduction to Husserl in Sartres Imagination was an unmistakably hyperbolic one.

Redoubling the force of this reading of Husserlian-Sartrean phenomenology in spring 1938,

this brief engagement in effect represents the final evidence of Becketts philosophical struggle
with the relation between subject and object; indeed arguably, these notes represent his final
struggle with philosophy full stop. By mid-1938, it would seem Western philosophy had fully
served its didactic purpose. Henceforth, while continuing to draw upon substantial notes
already accumulated over the past decade, in future only those thinkers with whom Beckett
felt a personal affinity appear to be revisited (like Samuel Johnson and Arthur Schopenhauer).
My point here is that Beckett stopped seeking answers through philosophy, especially
regarding subject-object relations so demonstrably exercising him previously, and thereafter
only went back to the notes he had already compiled, or instead reread those philosophical
authors he admired. In this sense, Becketts philosophical influences culminate with Husserlian
phenomenology, or better, Husserl as channeled by Sartre in both fictional and critical form.
Yet philosophy is by no means abandoned, as Rabinovitz also observed, in this case regarding
Becketts Watt (written 1940-45): It is not that he is reluctant to use philosophical themes,
rather, he is unwilling to permit them to undermine the aesthetic integrity of his works (1984,
140). In aesthetic terms, in fact, Beckett may be seen to be writing the very no-mans-land
between subject and object announced in his 1934 review, Recent Irish Poetry, a void
precipitated by the modernist breakdown of the object (1984, 70-1). Recalling that review
fully a generation later to his friend, the art critic Duthuit, Beckett explicitly linked his no
mans land concept to that vanished object given such iconoclastic voice by B in Becketts
interview-cum-manifesto from the same period, the 1949 Three Dialogues:

I remember coming out once, the regulation 20 years ago, being at that time less little than
now, with an angry article on modern Irish poets, in which I set up, as criterion of worthwhile
modern poetry, awareness of the vanished object. Already! And talking, as the only terrain
accessible to the poet, of the no mans land that he projects round himself, rather as a flame
projects its zone of evaporation. (qtd. in Gunn, 15)

In this light, a final question can be pursued more narrowly in terms of Beckett, Sartre and
Phenomenology: what did Beckett perceive in Sartres Imagination?

III.

Over several preceding chapters that critique Western philosophys tradition of smuggling in
metaphysical assumptions about the perceptual image, Sartre concludes Imagination, his first
major publication, with the chapter The Phenomenology of Husserl. This specifically
addresses the great event of pre-World-War-I philosophy, Husserls 1913 Ideas, destined to
revolutionize psychology no less than philosophy (127). Mired in both Husserl and his as-yet
unpublished Nausea, for Sartre in the mid-1930s it was Husserlian bracketing that
phenomenological reduction to pure consciousness that opened new paths for a modern
philosophy of life as lived in the here and now. And this, for Sartre, was a sort of secular
revelation: The notion of intentionality gives a new conception of images, considering that an
image, too, is an image of something. In a critical passage, Sartre argues:

By becoming an intentional structure the image has passed from the condition of an inert
content of consciousness to that of a unitary and synthetic consciousness in relation with a
transcendent object [] At a stroke vanish, along with the immanentist metaphysics of images,
all the difficulties adduced [] concerning the relationship of the simulacrum to the real
object, and of pure thought to the simulacrum. [] Husserl freed the psychic world of a
weighty burden and eliminated almost all the difficulties that clouded the classical problem of
the relations of images to thoughts. Husserl did not stop there with his suggestions, however.
In effect, if an image is but a name for a certain way in which consciousness takes aim on its
object, nothing prevents us from aligning physical images (paintings, drawings, photographs)
with images termed psychic. (131)

Sartre further illustrates this by describing, at length, Husserls analysis of a painting by

Albrecht Drer. With subject and object unified around an intending consciousness, Sartres
essay concludes by leaving it to others Modernist artists and writers in particular to address
a new fissure arising from Husserlian phenomenology, not between the now-unified subject
and object, but instead between images and perceptions; what Sartre respectively called
memory-images and fiction-images. In what might read as a program for Watt and Becketts
postwar fictions, Sartre concluded his 20-page paean to Husserl with a call to arms for a
phenomenological psychology:

We know that we must start afresh, setting aside all the prephenomenological literature, and
attempting above all to attain an intuitive vision of the intentional structure of the image. It
also becomes necessary to raise the novel and subtle question of the relations between
mental images and physical images (paintings, photographs, etc.) [] The way is open for a
phenomenological psychology. (143)

And where Sartres Imagination ends, it seems, Becketts Watt begins:

There are not, and never could be, images in consciousness. Rather, an image is a certain type
of consciousness. An image is an act, not some thing. An image is a consciousness of some
thing. (Sartre 1962, 146)

The creative consciousness is driven & obscure. (Beckett, Watt, Notebook 3, qtd. in Hayman,
33)

Importantly, Watt signals a sea-change in Becketts fiction. Situated between the semi-obscure
fiction, poetry and journalism of the interwar years, on one side, and the postwar frenzy of
writing, so facilitating his international acclaim on the other, Watt may be seen as the pivotal
novel in Becketts oeuvre. Simply put, Watt is Becketts artistic fulcrum, linking his early and
mature writings. For Watt marks the abandonment of writing in English for more than a
decade; it marks also the progressive abandonment of third-person narration, the elimination
of conventional literary structures like plot and setting, and even more contentiously, the
abandonment of any attempt at resolving the problem of writing about something. Sartres
reading of Husserlian phenomenology is, in conclusion, thus a major and under-investigated
influence on Watt, and thereby, Becketts turn toward a writing that may be considered a form
of phenomenological psychology. A final peek at what this falsifiable linking of Sartres
phenomenological influence on Beckett might entail follows by reference to those remarkably
consonant novels, Nausea and Watt.

Hymeneal still it lay, the thing so soon to be changed, between me and all the forgotten
horrors of joy, recounts Arsene, attempting to explain existence off the ladder to the
eponymous newcomer, despite his recent costiveness and want of stomach. But in what did
the change consist? (41-2). Grappling with this question over his twenty page short speech,
Arsene sets out his own struggles with meaning in Mr. Knotts sanctuary, thereby also
summarizing Watts ensuing struggle with the subject-object relation:

The change. In what did it consist? It is hard to say. Something slipped. There I was, warm and
bright, smoking my tobacco-pipe, watching the warm bright wall, when suddenly somewhere
some little thing slipped . To conclude from this that the incident was internal would, I think,
be rash. For my how shall I say? my personal system was so distended at the period of
which I speak that the distinction between what was inside it and what was outside it was not
at all easy to draw. Everything that happened happened inside it, and at the same time
everything that happened happened outside it . It was not an illusion, as long as it lasted,
that presence of what did not exist, that presence without, that presence within, that presence
between, though Ill be buggered if I can understand how it could have been anything else.
(41-3)

Arsenes radical change of appearance so distending his personal system reads like a
homage to Sartres near-contemporaneous novel, La Nause, also exploring abstract change

without object (4). For Nausea presents Antonin Roquentins battle with a very similar
phenomenological breakdown:

Nothing has changed and yet everything is different. I cant describe it; its like the Nausea and
yet its just the opposite: at last an adventure happens to me and when I question myself I see
that it happens that I am myself and that I am here; I am the one who splits the night, I am as
happy as a hero in a novel. (54)

Additional parallels in the novels are striking, from structural affinities like the explicit
editorial interventions across both works; e.g. Watts climactic (Hiatus in MS.) and (MS.
Illegible) (238, 240) and Nauseas Word left out and Word is illegible (125) to concluding
scenes at a railway station and all manner of events in between.[8] Indeed, the two texts
complement each other in the most intimate of ways, especially if extending to psychological
readings of madness, notably schizophrenia.[9] Roquentin laments to his diary in a manner
immediately redolent of Watts finding himself in the midst of things which, if they consented
to be named, did so as it were with reluctance (78) Things are divorced from their names
[] I am I the midst of things, nameless things. Alone, without words, defenceless, they
surround me, are beneath me, behind me, above me (125). In one of a series of distinctly
phenomenological passages on this experiential change, Roquentin, like Arsene, is outdoors,
and

then all of a sudden, there it was, clear as day: existence had suddenly unveiled itself. It had
lost the harmless look of an abstract category: it was the every past of things, this root was
kneaded into existence. Or rather the [tree] root, the park gates, the bench, the sparse grass,
all that had vanished: the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a
veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, all in disorder naked, in a
frightful, obscene nakedness. (127)

In passing judgment on this perceptual change, although I was not even conscious of the
transformation, Roquentin notes his atrocious joy: This moment was extraordinary. I was
there, motionless and icy, plunged in a horrible ecstasy (131). When Roquentin is in this state
of Husserlian bracketing, even uttering words is a little like an exorcism (125). But in Watts
overlapping case, this failure is even more general, and indeed pessimistic: For to explain had
always been to exorcise, for Watt (74-5).

As noted earlier, Edith Kern is one of the few Anglophone critics to have appreciated this
philosophical congruence, noting

Sartre and Beckett evoke in this respect analogous situations and even use similar terms to
describe them. Like the Roquentin of Nausea, Watt feels closing in on him a world that has lost

its human meaning and can no longer be put into human categories or safely expressed in
ordinary language. (190) [10]

Where Jacqueline Hoefer was ready to see Watt as pastiche on Logical Positivism and
Wittgensteins early attempt at an ideal language in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as the
empirical and rational system (74-5) by which Watt lives, Kern was far happier to cast Watts
linguistic instabilities with her own existentialist language: Explaining and naming are mans
weapons to exorcise an otherwise demonic universe that is threatening in its purposelessness
(190-1).

Despite this early and impressive critical linking of Beckett and Sartre, however, I want to
conclude by suggesting that it was the phenomenological Sartre of the later 1930s of real
interest to Beckett, and far less the existential Sartre made famous by the wartime No Exit
(1942) and Being and Nothingness (1943). In the first instance, this sense is captured by
Becketts response, discussing Sartrean philosophy, to Knowlsons arguing that, from my own
perspective, we were too firmly en situation (too limited by our situation) for the
existentialists emphasis on human freedom to have a lot of meaning, constraints largely
glossed over by existentialist philosophy. Beckett agreed enthusiastically with this objection,
Knowlson reports, saying that he found the actual limitations on mans freedom of action (his
genes, his upbringing, his social circumstances) far more compelling than the theoretical
freedom on which Sartre had laid so much stress (Knowlson and Haynes, 16-18). This
corresponds with letters linking Sartres Nausea to Albert Camus The Stranger in the mid1950s; and more importantly, in a letter of October 1945, some six months after the
completion of Watt, through a comment by Beckett on Morris Sinclairs request for academic
advice regarding a PhD. researching Sartre: His German adhesions would be into your barrow.
Husserl ? (Das Schloss, Der Prozess). Kierkegaard comes in also. I should be very glad to help
you and could introduce you to Sartre & his world (qtd. in Gunn, 14).

However, if struggles with meaning-creation ultimately lead to Watts institutionalization

ironic, given that Watt was written in wartime hiding to stay sane the manuscripts 1945
completion itself immediately preceded Becketts revelation: Molloy and the others came to
me the day I became aware of my own folly. Only then did I begin to write down what I feel.
(Knowlson, 333, 351-2, and 772 n.55). As emphatically set out in Becketts authorized
biography, even though the vision at last initiated the breakthrough writings of the postwar
years meaning that, in Knowlsons summation, outside reality would be refracted through
the filter of his own imagination a far longer process of stocking Becketts fertile imaginings,
of drawing upon experiences and erudition from the interwar period, nevertheless meant that,
by 1945, the ground had been well-prepared (352-3).

But in terms of Becketts artistic development, in what did the change consist? Although
there are several fruitful responses to this question (psychology, material conditions, wartime
experiences, the shift to French, and so on), one largely overlooked by Beckett Studies is
phenomenology. Both interpretative and genetic roads seem to lead back to Husserlian

philosophy, specifically his Ideas I, as mediated by Sartres interwar writings. In an uncannily

biographical and philosophical proximity, then, Beckett may be said to have arrived at an
artistic perspective on phenomenological psychology. As Sartre imparted to him in 1938, the
difference between real and fictional images need not be seen as an unbridgeable chasm,
but as a void to be fruitfully explored. And if Watt can be considered the workbook for
Becketts later fictions, of a last, stumbling exercise in writing direct experience prior to the
postwar frenzy of writing, then it was in this novel that subject and object first ceased to be
viewed as two holes [that] had been independently burst in the fence separating image and
world. Instead, through the synthesis of subject and object offered especially to Beckett by
Sartres rendering of Husserl in both fiction and non-fiction, an alternative conclusion first
comes into view in Watt: was it not after all just possible [] the two fences were but one?
(159-60)

[1] The epigraphs are taken from Edmund Husserls 1929 Cartesian Meditations, trans. D.
Carins (Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague: 1977), and Jean-Paul Sartre, cited in Edith Kerns
Existential Thought and Fictional Technique: Kierkegaard, Sartre, Beckett (Yale University
Press, London: 1970), pp. 7 and vii, respectively. In preparing this chapter, I am grateful for
relevant conversations with John Pilling and Erik Tonning; I also thankfully acknowledge
translations from German provided by Christian Engners and the late Detlef Mhlberger.
Sections of this article also appear in my chapter, But What Was This Pursuit of Meaning, in
This Indifference to Meaning?: Beckett, Husserl, Sartre and Meaning Creation, in Maude,
Ulrika and Matthew Feldman, eds., Beckett and Phenomenology (Continuum, London: 2009).
This volume represents the first study in English of Samuel Becketts relationship to
Phenomenology, save perhaps Eugene Kaelins The Unhappy Consciousness The Poetic Plight
of Samuel Beckett: An Inquiry at the Intersection of Phenomenology and Literature (Kluwer,
Dordrecht: 1981).

[2] See Feldman 2005.

[3] See Feldman 2002.

[4] See, for example, Nixon and Feldman (eds.), 2009.

[5] Examples of manuscripts in print that can be obtained and studied include:

The edited Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett by Knowlson and Gontarski, containing
manuscripts of Becketts plays;
Manuscript reproductions of Lessness and several late plays in Rosemary Pountneys Theatre
of Shadows;

full transcriptions of Becketts notes of Arnold Geulincx in van Ruler, Ulmann and Wilsons
edited Arnold Geulincx Ethics, and of an early notebook used for Dream of Fair to Middling
Women edited by John Pilling, Becketts Dream Notebook; annotated volumes including Chris
Ackerleys Demented Particulars and Obscure Locks, Simple Keys;
Bilingual Variorum editions of How It Is by Edouard Magessa OReilly, as well as Charles
Krances Ill Seen Ill Said, Company and A Piece of Monologue;
Numerous interviews with Beckett, like the recent Beckett Remembering / Remembering
Beckett, edited by Elizabeth and James Knowlson, and biographical accounts like John Pillings
A Samuel Beckett Chronology (See bibliography for bibliographical details)
[6] In Paul Ricouers words, phenomenology is the story of the deviations from Husserl; the
history of phenomenology is the history of Husserlian heresies (qtd. in Moran, 2-3).

[7] See Nixon, passim, and Tonning, 30-47.

[8] Regarding textual interventions, both novels ostensibly use footnotes for the guidance of
the attentive reader, as with Watts editorial warning on the numbers given for the Lynch
family (The figures given here are incorrect. The consequent calculations are therefore doubly
erroneous, [101, 211]); or Nauseas the text of the undated pages ends here (3).

[9] The only Anglophone work treating this intimacy in any detail is found in Sass.

[10] In a work published the year previously, Michael Robinson noted that Watts
refusal of things to assume their time-honoured names is a modern dilemma which has
occupied writers since it was first acknowledged by Hofmannsthal, Rilke and Proust []
Although he is more coherent Roquentin is in a very similar position to Watt. In the midst of
the nameless he too sets to trying names on things. (125-6)

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