Images of Beckett - Index of

introduced yet another myth into those that surrounded his life and career. 49
His subject matter certainly did undergo a significant change after the Second
World War in the direction he described. His post-war writing in French was
undoubtedly grounded more in feeling and in not knowing than in knowing.
I am not suggesting that Beckett did not have a flash of insight akin to that
described in the ‘vision’ that Krapp experiences in Krapp’s Last Tape. What I
am suggesting is that the revelation to which he drew attention was not a
single Road to Damascus experience but rather a long drawn-out process,
and that to see Beckett’s work as divided into two parts, pre- and
post-revelation, can easily distort our view of his development as a writer. As
a number of critics have shown, some of his late themes were already deeply
embedded in his earlier work, for example, the interest that he showed in
Democritus’ idea that ‘nothing is more real than nothing’ or the quietistic
impulse that is present already in Dream of Fair to Middling Women. But the
notion of a capitalised ‘revelation’ also hides several earlier, less
sudden or less dramatic revelations: the certainty that he had to dissociate
himself at an early stage from Joyce’s influence; the reassessment of himself
necessitated by almost two years of psychotherapy; the effect on him of being
stabbed and in danger of dying; the freedom to discover himself as a writer
that living away from Ireland freed from his mother’s sternly critical
influence offered him; the impact of the war years, when his friends were
arrested and he was forced to escape and live in hiding; and the greater
objectivity that working with others at St-Lô allowed him to assume with
respect to his own inner self. The ground had been thoroughly prepared.
I also suggest that a recognition of ignorance was already to be found at
the heart of his attitudes before the war and that, in spite of what he said, he
never suppressed his own fierce attachment to learning. Beckett was, as his
close friend Barbara Bray once put it to me, like a swan, sailing serenely
along, spotting and picking up morsels from different parts of the lake, then
predigesting them, before making them unequivocally his own.
Commenting once on his formidable knowledge of Dante – with his pocket
(Right) Samuel Beckett, 1973
38 IMAGES OF BECKETT