The Problem of Reading, Phenomenologically or Otherwise

Abstract

In speaking about Eugene Kaelin’s speaking about Samuel Beckett’s speaking about and creating a world or worlds of human self-examination,¹ we are too easily distracted from the difficulty of the undertaking and too easily persuaded of its presumption. Beckett’s fictions are peculiarly definite but indeterminately located, conveyed by a cadenced language that remembers older formalities in a contemporary voice, and focused, one cannot doubt, on the drama of human resolution and irresolution and doubt and confidence and reflexive questioning and answering and awareness of same. It is easy to say that Beckett is occupied in this sense in a notably pure and persistent way with the human condition — not necessarily with its essential condition if the existential theme cannot be thus reduced, but at least with indefinitely many strands of puzzling about purposing without puzzling about purposes. In this regard, Beckett baffles by being banal — banal, that is, not in the second-order sense. So saying, we are ourselves launched almost without deliberate effort into extending the critic’s labors. If it is true that Beckett’s oeuvre is thus absorbed, then it is reasonable to suppose that all competent speakers of the language are already suitably attuned to the family of selfinvestigative efforts that his central characters betray and display.