CRITERIOS USABILIDAD PARA DSPACE UC

happy, often now my murmur falters and dies and I weep for happiness as I go along and for love of this old earth that has carried me so long and whose uncomplainingness will soon be mine. Just under the surface I shall be, all together at first, then separate and drift, through all the earth and perhaps in the end through a cliff into the sea, something of

me. (CSP 133-4)

Far from wishing for "new ground", the narrator longs only for the comfort of "old earth" . Yet it is just here in

decay that his movements become most exploratory - far from the beaten track of those "same old roads" he does literally break new ground: "separate and drift, through all the earth and perhaps in the end through a cliff into the sea". There's an air of flight and release about that. (The sea, after all, is a regenerative element; it "tosses up our

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losses" , it is where life originates.) Here "old earth" is putatively not a final resting place but a thoroughfare.

Indeed it is similarly represented in Old E a r t h , where every third year a generation of cockchafers finds release.

Three years in the earth, those the moles don't get, then guzzle guzzle, ten days long, a fortnight, and always the flight at nightfall. To the river perhaps,

they head for the river. (CSP 201)

That text too, like From An Abandoned W o r k , contemplates and merges dissolution and renewal: "[...] see the sky, a long gaze, but no, gasps and spasms, a childhood sea, other skies, another body" (CSP 201). The "gasps and spasms" may be those of the dying or of the new-born; the other circumstances of body and time alluded to subsequently may be the fragmentary memories of a dying man, or his forward looking thoughts concerning incipient life.

Abandoned Work the narrator would be "all over" only in the sense of being ubiquitous. A r s e n e 's meditation in Watt on the "poor old lousy old earth" - "lousy" because infested by the teeming generations represented by the list of fathers and mothers - was essentially retrospective (W 45). Here the narrator's contemplation of "old earth" looks forward, not only to his own decomposition, but also through a perhaps subliminal ambiguity in the syntax - to p rospective generations, to successors: "[...] all together at first, then separate and drift, through all the earth

[...] something of me." For all its overt desire for oblivion, then. From An Abandoned Work also registers a residual and covert desire to "leave a trace" (CSP 113).

3.4 Incipience and New Life

The passage discussed in the last section may be drawing on Schopenhauer's thought where it comes closest to pantheism. For Schopenhauer the world as a whole is merely the objectification of Will, Schopenhauer's version of the Kantian t h i n g - i n - i t s e l f . Will is a constant striving to no

end and is manifested in the world as a whole, both animate and inanimate nature. The Will is thus indifferent to individuals, the individual merely being an entity created by the p r i ncipium i n d i v i d u a t i o n i s . When an individual dies, no change is registered by the Will which merely continues its striving in other forms. The Will "appears in every blindly acting force of nature, and also in the deliberate

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conduct of m a n " . In death

those subdued forces of nature win back from the organism, wearied even by constant victory, the matter snatched from them, and attain to unimpeded expression

of their being. (1.146)

That well describes the sense of release looked forward to in From An Abandoned Work (though there the narrator's final insistence - tacked to the end of the sentence - on "something of me" suggests a slight reluctance to surrender the p r i n c i p i u m individuationis) . For Schopenhauer the idea that the forces of nature acting on a decaying body are themselves manifestations of the same will that was manifest in that body when alive is not meant to be a source of comfort, for it only testifies to the implacability of the Will which is itself evil. (The death of an individual can

Nevertheless, in From An Abandoned W o r k , the idea that somehow "something of me" will be wending its way through inanimate matter seems a source of some comfort. Usually in Beckett the unendingness of life, in whatever form, is regarded as a torment, but it's notable that this passage suggests a sort of benign pantheism.

Schopenhauer, unlike many later philosophers - notably N i e t z s c h e c h a r a c t e r i s e s the Will as fundamentally evil, because it keeps us in a constant state of want.

Every attained end is at the same time the beginning of a new course, and so on ad infinitum. The plant raises its phenomenon from the seed through stem and leaf to blossom and fruit, which is in turn only the beginning of a new seed, of a new individual, which once more runs through the old course, and so through endless

t i m e . (1.164)

This lies behind A r s e n e 's diatribe against the seasons in Watt which ends only with, "the whole bloody thing starting all over again" (W 46), and it explains Schopenhauer's view that to see children is to see a tiresome re-run of a performance. The "old course" is related to the "same old

roads" of From An Abandoned W o r k .

It is notable, however, that in The World as Will and R e p r e s e n t a t i o n , despite the conclusion that the best thing is denial of the will to live, the prose is most compelling

succeeds only in demonstrating its heterogeneity. One can't help feeling that the energy of this protean Will, for all the suffering it causes, is something in itself to be wondered at and admired.

Beckett, too, seems alive to the animated elan as well as the regrettable suffering of what the Unnamable, after Darwin and Schopenhauer, calls "the great life torrent streaming from the earliest protozoa to the very latest humans" (T 295). Although often associated only with a ttenuated dereliction, Beckett's world is also one of burgeoning profusion and constant incipience. The great life torrent, while overtly regretted, is also indirectly celebrated; the writing has a life of its own.

For Beckett new life is both inevitable and surprising. In the early fiction, one of Belacqua's girlfriends is threatening because a "brood-maiden" (MPTK 128): she is in the habit of "looking babies in his eyes" (DFMW 19). To "look babies" is to gaze into the eyes of another and create the reciprocal reflections of faces in irises, and this