Beckett and Buddhism by Angela B. Moorjani
2022; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 62; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/esp.2022.0053
ISSN1931-0234
Autores Tópico(s)Franz Kafka Literary Studies
ResumoReviewed by: Beckett and Buddhism by Angela B. Moorjani Nadia Louar Angela B. Moorjani. Beckett and Buddhism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. 260. $99.99. Beckett and Buddhism explores the "imaginative dialogue" between Samuel Beckett's writing and Buddhist and Eastern thought. Drawing on published correspondence and prodigious archival material both to confirm Arthur Schopenhauer as a source of Beckett's knowledge of Buddhism and to substantiate her research, Angela Moorjani traces back Buddhist influences in the author's early fictions and meticulously uncovers their reverberations in his entire œuvre. Schopenhauer's tutelage of the Irish francophone author in Eastern thought and philosophies is central to Moorjani's opening chapters. As the title of the first announces, Moorjani "revisits" Schopenhauer's Upanishadic and Buddhist thought, from which the famed German philosopher borrowed his seminal metaphorical concept of the veil of mãya, to ascertain the transtextual relations that Beckett's texts entertain with Buddhist concepts. The "ideal real"—affiliated here with the Buddhist doctrine of the two truths—and other mystics entangling with the Christian teachings of Meister Eckart are presented by Moorjani as exegetical keys to elucidate the creative [End Page 177] asylum and space of writing of Beckett's posthumously published early novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women and the short story Echo's Bones. In her third chapter, the critic explores further Buddhist resonances in "Beckett's Belacqua saga" via Schopenhauer and takes a closer look at the principles of rebirth and reincarnation in "Beckett's most Buddhist creation," as John Calder famously dubbed the titular hero of Murphy. Madhyamika philosophy of language is central to her fourth chapter and facilitates a renewed discussion on Beckett's Mauthnerian project of a "literature of the unword." The chapters constituting the second part of the book scrutinize the Buddhist and mystic concepts permeating Beckett's postwar fiction and his later texts. Returning to familiar Beckettian themes such as spectrality, timelessness, mindlessness, and liminality, among others, Moorjani examines the various narrative and dramatic manifestations of coincidental contraries, such as birth and death, posthumous presence, and the motif of a "mystical elsewhere" through the lens of Japanese mugen (dream) Noh plays. Seamlessly moving to later works in her sixth chapter, she reexamines Not I's ventriloquism as a "dreaming back" performance that partakes in the citational practices of Beckett's story telling. In the last two chapters, Moorjani investigates the tropes of the rebirth and the unborn in some of the late texts, notably How It is and the second trilogy Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, and Worstward Ho. Her investigation into the liminal time and space of "death in life" or "life in death" leads her back to Beckett's "poetics of elsewhere," envisioned here as the intimation of a "beyond birth and death," which Moorjani associates with the Mahayana Buddhist concept of Śūnyatā, that is, "the void, nothing else." In fact, "nothing left but try & eff it," as Beckett memorably wrote to his friend Avigdor Arikha in 1984, may best capture the Buddhist inflected dreamlike poetics with which Moorjani concludes her book. "Dreaming 'all away' in the Final Texts," as she titled her last chapter, conveys indeed all the elegiac nuances of Beckett's final words in Stirring Still and What is the Word. It also epitomizes the exegetical "folly" on which Angela Moorjani embarks to translate in critical terms "the unknowable beyond" of Beckett's œuvre, which her Beckett and Buddhism remarkably achieves. Nadia Louar University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh Copyright © 2023 L'Esprit Créateur
Referência(s)