CUNY Academic Commons

This is a chapter from The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett by one of my favorite critics, Jean-Michel Rabaté. The chapter deals with ethics in Beckett as an unreason: “He postulates an irrational imperative that just states the need to keep on saying, living, and creating.” This, Rabaté argues, constitutes an alternative to the darker side of rational, universalizing ethics: the mechanization of man through his allegiance to the rational imperative. Likewise, it is an alternative to a divine justice that claims reason as its organ despite the seeming paradox of Dantean Contrapasso in which justice and injustice mingle. From Dante’s moral universe to Proust’s amoral universe to parallels with Adorno and Horkheimer, Rabaté puts Beckett’s oeuvre through the contextual gamut in order to draw out almost impossibly erudite allusions and intertextual legacies. Having spent the semester dealing with theory’s often tragic lionization of literature and art, I find this serious, informed appraisal of an actual artist’s ethical dimension (understood of course as a sustained problematic as opposed to a system or argument) refreshing.