Towards an Analysis of Geulincx and the Ur-Watt

Murphy, Geulincx and an Occasional(ist) Game of Chess

David Tucker

With a few chapters left to write of Murphy in January 1936 Beck-ett ventured “within the abhorred gates for the first time since theescape, on a commission from Ruddy” (Letter to Thomas Mac-Greevy, 9th January 1936 in Engelberts, Frost and Maxwell 2006,p. 144) of Trinity College Dublin (hereafter TCD). He revisitedthe library until April, writing around 52 pages of lightly anno-tated transcriptions in the original Latin from three of the majorworks of occasionalist philosopher Arnold Geulincx (1624-1669).

Beckett had encountered the obscure philosopher prior to this.In 1932-1934 as part of the 267 pages of ‘philosophy notes’ he hadwritten briefly on occasionalism in a lineage outlined in one of hiscompendium source books for philosophical history, WilhelmWindelband’s A History of Philosophy. From here Beckett notes:

This furthest developed in Ethics of Geulincx. Illustration of the 2Clocks which having once been synchronised by same artificer con-tinue to move in perfect harmony, “absque ulla causalitate qua alterumhoc in altero causat, sed propter meram dependentiam, qua utrumqueab eadem arte et simili industria constitutum est”.

What anthropologism!Leibniz illustrated with same analogy his doctrine of “preestab-

lished harmony”, characterised Cartesian conception by immediateand permanent interdependence of 2 clocks, and Occasionalist byconstantly renewed regulation of clocks by clock master1.

The Latin quotation from Geulincx that Windelband cites istranslated in the 2006 Ethics as part of the following passage (quo-

1 Excerpted from Beckett’s ‘philosophy notes’, TCD MS 10967/189. Alsoin Windelband 1907, pp. 415-416.

TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 190

tations given in the following that are between pp. 311-353 ofGeulincx’s 2006 Ethics are from Beckett’s notes).

It is the same as if two clocks agree with each other and with thedaily course of the Sun: when one chimes and tells the hours, the oth-er also chimes and likewise indicates the hour; and all that without anycausality in the sense of one having a causal effect on the other, but ratheron account of mere dependence, inasmuch as both of them have beenconstructed with the same art and similar industry.

(Geulincx 2006, p. 332 [my italics])

This historically important passage (it is the section in Ethicsaround which debates arose in the nineteenth century disputingthe provenance of Leibniz’s clock metaphor2) was identicallytranscribed from both Windelband and then later from Geulincxin 1936. Its duplication demonstrates a line of continuance be-tween Beckett’s cribbing philosophy notes of 1932-1934 and thelater more in-depth study.

A minority of the later detailed notes from 1936 are taken fromGeulincx’s Metaphysics and Questions Concerning Disputations,while the majority, around 40 pages, are from Ethics. Publishedposthumously in 1675, Ethics was intended by Geulincx as a com-pletion of the Cartesian project in a reasoned, Christian and oftenmystical, ethical system. The maxim of this system, whichGeulincx repeatedly emphasises as “the summation” and “thesupreme principle of Ethics, from which you can easily deduceevery single one of the obligations that make up the scope ofEthics” is “ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis” [“wherein you have nopower, therein you should not will”] (Geulincx 2006, p. 316). Thephrase has also become a familiar and frequent refrain in Beckettstudies. Its first known mention by Beckett is in a letter to ThomasMacGreevy of 16th January 1936 where Beckett writes:

I suddenly see that Murphy is [a] break down between his: Ubi ni-hil vales ibi nihil velis (position) and Malraux’s Il est difficile à celuiqui vit hors du monde de ne pas rechercher les siens (negation).

(Letter to Thomas MacGreevy, 16th January 1936, in Knowlson1996, p. 219)

D. Tucker. Murphy, Geulincx and an Occasional(ist) Game of Chess 191

2 On this see De Lattre 1970, pp. 553-566 and De Vleeschauwer 1957, pp.45-56.


192 Beckett and Philosophers

At the beginning of March in another letter to MacGreevyBeckett shows characteristic aporia regarding this research whenhe says:

I have been reading Geulincx in T.C.D., without knowing why ex-actly. Perhaps because the text is so hard to come by. But that is ra-tionalisation and my instinct is right & the work worth doing, becauseof its saturation in the conviction that the sub specie aeternitatis [fromthe perspective of eternity] vision is the only excuse for remainingalive.

(Letter to Thomas MacGreevy, 5th March 1936, in Engelberts,Frost and Maxwell 2006, p. 145)

Until 2006 no English translation from the original “BeautifulBelgo-Latin” (Murphy, p. 101) of Ethics that Murphy recalls whencasting his vote for the little world had existed. Indeed the Latinedition was out of print for nearly 200 years before inclusion inJ.P.N. Land’s 3-volume complete collected edition of Geulincx’sworks (published 1891-1893) Beckett used at TCD. Perhapspracticalities such as these go some way to explaining why, despiteBeckett’s explicit references to Geulincx as being the place fromwhich a commentary of his work might start, there is not the vol-ume of scholarly work in this area one might expect. Recent andpersuasive studies by Anthony Uhlmann, Matthew Feldman,Shane Weller and Chris Ackerley have added to previous work byRupert Wood in his 1993 article for the Journal of Beckett Studies.Hugh Kenner, John Pilling, David Hesla and others have devot-ed sections to Geulincx3. Yet the studies are not exhaustive. Sowith a view to what appears currently as a strangely new and si-multaneously old area of Beckett studies, before a discussion ofsome elements of Geulincx’s occasionalist philosophy put to cre-ative use in Murphy, the text most often associated with Beckett’sinterest in Geulincx, I want to first offer some further evidence inBeckett’s correspondence for assessing the importance ofGeulincx.

3 See also Casanova 2006 and Dobrez 1986.


Correspondence4

The best known mention of Geulincx is the 1967 letter to the crit-ic Sighle Kennedy, reprinted in Disjecta, where Beckett writes:

I simply do not feel the presence in my writings as a whole of theProust & Joyce situations you evoke. If I were in the unenviable posi-tion of having to study my work my points of departure would be the“Naught is more real...” and the “Ubi nihil vales...” both already inMurphy and neither very rational.

(Kennedy 1971, p. 300)

One might of course think this single letter warrant enough forscholarly investigation, and it has indeed been used to anchor cer-tain readings of Geulincx in Murphy. However, it appears Beck-ett had been writing to critics and colleagues on the subject ofGeulincx, at regular intervals, over the previous thirty years.

Another letter dating from the time Beckett was engaged in theresearch at TCD in 1936 is addressed to a friend and member ofthe Dublin literati Arland Ussher. It speaks of Beckett’s enthusi-asm for his discoveries:

I am obliged to read in Trinity College Library, as ArnoldusGeulincx is not available elsewhere. I recommend him to you mostheartily, especially his Ethica, and above all the second section of thesecond chapter of the first tractate, where he disquires on his fourthcardinal virtue, Humility, contemptus negativus sui ipsius [to com-prise its own contemptible negation].

(Letter to Arland Ussher, 25th March 1936, in Feldman 2006, p. 132)

Beckett also wrote to George Reavey on what is presumablymisdated (in the same way one written on the same day to Mac-Greevy is misdated) the 9th January 1935[6], in which he briefly


4 I would like to express my gratitude to John Pilling, James Knowlson andMark Nixon for their help with the correspondence. Due to copyright restric-tions certain letters must unfortunately remain unpublished here: those to MaryHutchinson and one to George Duthuit. Hopefully these will soon see the fullerlight of day. For complete quotations and further correspondence, see my DPhilthesis, provisionally titled “A Literary Fantasia”: Uses of Philosophy in the Fic-tion of Samuel Beckett.


mentions his Trinity research on Geulincx. In this letter he seeksto play down the significance Brian Coffey was currently attach-ing to Beckett’s philosophical interests, perhaps based on Cof-fey’s plans to publish a series of philosophical monographs:

He [Coffey] appears to want to make the philosophical series veryserious & Fach. But my Geulincx could only be a literary fantasia.

(Letter to George Reavey, 9th January 1936, in Fehsenfeld andOverbeck, 2009, p. 295)

Two letters to George Duthuit in the late 1940s, which followaround ten years after the letters sent from Dublin while doing theresearch, refer to Geulincx. In the first of these the maxim fromEthics is again given in relation to Murphy. Beckett emphasises theall-encompassing nature of the maxim, that it underpins a con-ception of self as worth nothing, and that there is no risk of exag-gerating the scope of such a conception of self (see footnote n. 4).These assessments are some of Beckett’s most emphatic state-ments on Geulincx. In a second letter, published in 2006, Beck-ett describes Bram van Velde and an art of non-relation, using aterm gleaned from Geulincx – autology, as applied to the artistwho “indulges now and then in a small séance of autology with agreedy sucking sound” (Letter to George Duthuit, 9th March1949, in Gontarski and Uhlmann 2006, p. 19). The term autologydates from the middle seventeenth century5 and is used byGeulincx in Metaphysics to refer to a process of self-examination.Autology “involves a shutting-out of all extraneous perception”(Uhlmann 2006, p. 83), followed by a two-part manoeuvre. First-ly, inspection of the self – inspectio sui. This is depicted as a self-analysis that leads logically to its opposite, “a carelessness and ne-glect of oneself” (Geulincx 2006, p. 326), so-called despectio sui,a turning away from self due to self-inspection’s discovery of al-most total ignorance. The realisation of such ignorance and, asGeulincx argues, concomitant incapacity to act, should engenderhumility, a specific form of humility described in systematic detailby Geulincx, and lauded by him as “the most exalted of the Car-


5 OED cites first use of the word in 1633 by Phineas Fletcher: “He thatwould learn Theologie must first study autologie. The way to God is by ourselves.”



dinal Virtues” (Geulincx 2006, p. 326). The letter to Usshershows that for Beckett this humility was of key interest.

A letter in 1954 to Doctor Erich Franzen, the German trans-lator of Molloy, is unusually expansive in its explications of allu-sion. Franzen asks about a passage in Molloy that reads:

I who had loved the image of old Geulincx, dead young, who leftme free, on the black boat of Ulysses, to crawl towards the East, alongthe deck.

(Molloy, p. 51)

Beckett says in the letter this is in part a reference to an imagesuggested by Geulincx:

where he compares human freedom to that of a man, on board a boatcarrying him irresistibly westward, free to move eastward within thelimits of the boat itself, as far as the stern.

(Letter to Dr Erich Franzen, 17th February 1954, in Uhlmann2006, p. 78)

Such valiant because doomed effort is, Molloy opines, “a greatmeasure of freedom, for him who has not the pioneering spirit”(Molloy, p. 51).

Two years later, in 1956, Beckett wrote to the writer and life-long friend of T.S. Eliot, Mary Hutchinson, in a remarkably sim-ilar way to how he would eleven years later write the famous let-ter to Sighle Kennedy. He describes how he cannot bear to lookback over or into his previous work, then supposes that a com-mentary might arise based in Geulincx and the Abderites.Though Beckett decidedly does not, or indeed want to, know ifsuch is the case (see footnote n. 4).

One intriguing variant between the letters to Hutchinson andKennedy is that to Hutchinson Beckett claims Geulincx’s maximcomplicates, rather than compliments Democritus’ ancient phrase“Naught is more real than nothing”6, the phrase powerful enough

6 However, the sophist Protagoras and atomist Leucippus also came fromAbdera, which might complicate this complication. Beckett was certainly fa-miliar with the former, having taken notes on his theories of perception, his life,and his meeting with Zeno, as part of the ‘philosophy notes’. Over twenty years



on its own, according to Malone, that it can “pollute the whole ofspeech” (Malone Dies, p. 193)7. Geulincx addresses Democritusexplicitly in Ethics a number of times, referring to his atomist voidas a “bottomless well” (Geulincx 2006, p. 20) that is categorical-ly “not even consistent with Reason” (Geulincx 2006, p. 90). Theguffaw of Democritus from Abdera, the so-called (by Horace8)laughing philosopher, is a well-known sound in Beckett’s work.Purportedly directed at pretensions to immortality it arises fromDemocritus’ contention that the body and soul, made of an infi-nite number of atoms that move eternally in a void, a void as realas the atoms therein, will more prosaically disintegrate at death.Atoms themselves are eternal, yet they comprise objects that arenot. The mythical laugh is metonymic. It is a laugh of indifferencetowards ontological impermanence, and by extension towardsany attachment in the world whatsoever. Such attachments are il-lusory as they are fleeting. It is the famous mirthless “risus purus”of Watt (p. 47).

Beckett’s contrast between the two philosophers, Geulincxand Democritus, is fantastically effective. Geulincx’s adherenceto his motto of “Serious and Candid”9 is clearly held in warm re-gard by Beckett but is significantly opposed by an antithetical guf-faw of Democritus. There is a productive argument to be had be-tween the two philosophers on the subject of nothingness, but, inorder to concentrate on Geulincx, here further discussion of itmust be forestalled.

later, responding to a query from Alan Schneider on 21st November 1957 aboutwho exactly Hamm’s “Old Greek” might be, Beckett reveals this might be Pro-tagoras (see Harmon 1998, p. 23). This letter is also discussed in Feldman 2006,pp. 32-33. Despite evidence suggesting Beckett was wrong about his reference(the “Old Greek” was more likely Zeno), his pointing to Protagoras indicatesthis Abderite’s presence in his thoughts (see Windelband 1907, p. 89).

7 Beckett and Hutchinson corresponded further on the subject of Geulincx.A letter dated two weeks later from Beckett also mentions Geulincx, and theearlier difficulties obtaining a version of Ethica from the National Library in Ire-land, forcing the return to TCD. Significantly in this letter Beckett distanceshimself from Murphy’s admiration of Geulincx’s language, but is fascinated byits world where man is a puppet.

8 See Horace 2005, p. 113 (Epistles II, line 194).9 The motto “Serio et Candide” appears as part of a coat of arms on the title

pages of Opera Philosophica.


Over a substantial period then, some thirty years, Beckett ref-erences Geulincx or his central principles from Ethics, in corre-spondence. The 1967 letter to Sighle Kennedy is far from ananomaly and instead appears to be the last so far known of a reg-ular and remarkably consistent lineage of correspondence explic-itly pointing to the significance of Geulincx. Perhaps such evi-dence and the English translation of the Ethics which includesBeckett’s notes might contribute in the future to a more compre-hensive investigation of the indications Beckett gave to at leastseven known correspondents: MacGreevy, Ussher, Reavey,Duthuit, Franzen, Hutchinson, Kennedy, and probably alsoLawrence Harvey10.

Murphy

Given this evidence for Beckett’s repeated referencing ofGeulincx’s concepts over a thirty-year period, and knowing thatthe notes taken in TCD in 1936 remained with Beckett all his life(along with the rest of the Notes Diverses Holo collection, in con-trast to many other papers donated to archives at Reading or else-where), why might we want to go back to Murphy to begin locat-ing moments where Geulincx is important?11 There are at leasttwo main reasons for this. Firstly, there are the convincing argu-ments made by Feldman about Beckett’s uses of “his contempo-raneous reading in his writings”12. Beckett himself described theearly 1930s as being “soiled [...] with the old demon of note -


10 Harvey paraphrases a remark by Beckett that appears to repeat again thesubstance of the Hutchinson and Kennedy letters. However no citation is givenand it is unclear whether Harvey is referring to one of the interviews conduct-ed between himself and Beckett in 1962 or if he has perhaps made a mistake andmisdated the Kennedy letter by five years. See Harvey 1970, p. 267.

11 It should be noted that there is no current evidence Beckett would readGeulincx in the original after 1936 or add to his notes. However, Uhlmann inhis introduction to Beckett’s notes on Geulincx describes how two differenttypewriters were probably used to produce the two fair copies of notes, indi-cating they might have been produced at different times. See Geulincx 2006, pp.307-308.

12 Matthew Feldman, forthcoming in Russell Smith (editor), Beckett andEthics (Continuum, London 2009). I would like to express my gratitude toMatthew Feldman for permission to cite this.


snatching” (Letter to Thomas MacGreevy, August 1931, in En-gelberts, Frost and Maxwell 2006, p. 21). He would find a way tomove out of the shadow of this old demon, but it was a significantshadow cast originally by the “epic, heroic” (Knowlson 1996, p.105) and encyclopaedic Joyce. Feldman adds further archival sub-stance to similar appraisals made by James Knowlson ten yearsearlier, where Knowlson writes:

Beckett’s notebooks show [...] that he too plundered the booksthat he was reading or studying for material that he could then incor-porate into his own writing. Beckett copied out striking, memorableor witty sentences or phrases into his notebooks. Such quotations ornear quotations were then woven into the dense fabric of his earlyprose. It is what could be called a “grafting” technique that runs attimes almost wild. He even ticked them in his private notebooks oncethey had been incorporated into his own work.

(Knowlson 1996, p. 106)

Secondly, there is Beckett’s own use of Murphy specifically andconsistently when referencing Geulincx in correspondence. If wetake a further small leap of faith, that Murphy was composedchronologically, we can note that when Beckett wrote on February6th 1936 that “There only remain three chapters of mechanical writ-ing” (Letter to Thomas MacGreevy, 6th February 1936, in Acker-ley 2004, p. 13), the specific work being done on Murphy wouldhave been towards the final few chapters of the thirteen chapternovel. In chapter 9 Geulincx and his maxim from the Ethics are ex-plicitly mentioned, and a number of the studies cited above drawout elements of Murphy’s mind in chapter 6 as occasionalist13. Thesection I want to focus on is the chess game of chapter 11, to see ifit might be read in terms of Geulincx’s occasionalist philosophy offutile causation. We can thereby note not only how the game servesas a significant instantiation of Beckett’s interest in Geulincx, butalso that this interest and its application falls not far short of rescu-ing the novel being birthed with great difficulty. In the processGeulincx in Murphy serves as a connection to aspects of narrativethat would prove greatly productive for Beckett in the transition


13 See particularly Ackerley 2004 and Wood 1993.


from the more realistic framework of Murphy to the great middleperiod works via the enumerative, game-playing Watt.

Geulincx asserts that the action of the mind on the body is in-effable, a word he often uses and which recalls Arsene’s doomedattempts in Watt to “eff” (Watt, p. 61) the ineffable. When some-thing is ineffable for Geulincx this is not because

we cannot speak or think of it (for this would be nothing, nothing andunthinkable being the same), but because we cannot think about or en-compass with our reason how it is done[.]

(Geulincx 2006, p. 334)

In an example that Geulincx’ fellow occasionalist Malebran chewill also use, I may know something of the anatomy of blood flow,for example, between my arm and brain when my arm moves. Butthis does not suffice to explain what remains for Geulincx an inef-fable how14. There always remains a residue of experience not ex-hausted by knowledge of that experience. As he says: “an ineffablesomething is always missing” (Geulincx 2006, p. 334).

It follows from this that the mind cannot be said to cause anyaction in any body. For Geulincx I can only be said to perform anaction if I can also understand (“encompass with our reason”)how I do it. Lacking this knowledge I must defer with humility toa greater causal agent than myself, which for Geulincx is God. Ahuman mind is necessarily limited, and as such all a mind knowsis that it appears to itself as if it causes actions. Of the bodyGeulincx believes this irrational thing, in contrast to a rationalmind and in a familiar Cartesian binary, is nothing but brute mat-ter and therefore cannot be responsible for causing thoughts tooccur in a mind. Geulincx’s severe response to these issues is toboldly assert the metaphysical parallel of his ethical maxim in aphrase which Beckett transcribed from both Metaphysics andEthics, “what you do not know how to do is not your action”(Geulincx 1999, p. 95, and 2006, p. 330). All responsibility for ac-


14 For a more detailed discussion of this see Geulincx 2006, pp. 225-230,where Geulincx describes such scientific knowledge as a posteriori, so it is “nomore than a consciousness and perception of the fact that motion is takingplace” (Geulincx 2006, p. 228).


tion and movement becomes, according to Geulincx, “someoneelse’s affair” (Geulincx 2006, p. 333), that someone being God.

Geulincx argues for a cogito, contra his philosophical progeni-tor Descartes, of ignorance. We should follow a programme of self-inspection, but whereas Descartes found therein ground for allpossible future knowledge to be ‘scientifically’ grounded andstructured, Geulincx finds ignorance of our place in the world andhow we might interact with that world. In basing his philosophy ongrounding principles of incapacity rather than sure knowledge,Geulincx’s cogito, as Uhlmann points out, becomes a nescio (“tonot know”, Uhlmann 2006, p. 99). Geulincx’s eyes, as Beckettwrites in March 1936, are “without Schwämerei turned inward”(Letter to Thomas MacGreevy, 5th March 1936, in Engelberts,Frost and Maxwell, 2006, p. 145) (his principle of inspectio sui).However, finding that we do not know anything about the thingsthat we do, and therefore that we cannot be said to actually do any-thing at all in the world, “He [Geulincx] does not put out his eyeson that account, as Heraclitus did & Rimbaud began to, nor likethe terrified Berkeley repudiate them. One feels them very pa-tiently turned outward” (Letter to Thomas MacGreevy, 5th March1936, in Engelberts, Frost and Maxwell, 2006, p. 145) in humilityand in wonder (the consequent principle of despectio sui).

It is in this act of turning, the direction of looking, that Murphyfails. He looks inside himself and finds there the joyous “pleasure,such pleasure that pleasure was not the word” (Murphy, p. 6) andfinds no reason to look out again. Strapped into this closed spacehe clumsily sets light to the big world around him and he is messi-ly gone forever. For Murphy, flattered that he might appear to oth-ers as similar to the catatonic Clarke, the patients in the MagdalenMental Mercyseat are, like his own mind, a “Matrix of surds [...]missiles without provenance or target, caught up in a tumult ofnon-Newtonian motion” (p. 66). And for Murphy Mr Endon is theapotheosis of this, the point at which to End-on. Mr Endon is a par-adigmatic achievement of a self-inspection, a staring at oneself, atthe “within” (as is often pointed out in regard to Mr Endon’s name,the Greek preposition endon means “within”).

Mr Endon apparently suffers (though this may be such suffer-ing that suffering was not the word, for he is numb, and invio-lable) from “a psychosis so limpid and imperturbable that Mur-




phy felt drawn to it as Narcissus to his fountain” (p. 105). How-ever, as Murphy peers with an impatient eye through the Judaswindow into the little world of Mr Endon’s cell the discrepancybetween the two becomes clear:

the sad truth was, that while Mr Endon for Murphy was no less thanbliss, Murphy for Mr Endon was no more than chess. Murphy’s eye?Say rather, the chessy eye. Mr Endon had vibrated to the chessy eyeupon him and made his preparations accordingly.

(Murphy, p. 135)

A farce as ridiculous as the monkeys playing chess Beckettwanted for a frontispiece of the novel15, the frustratedly stuck-in-the-big-world Murphy and the unwittingly stuck-in-the-little-world Mr Endon will play out through Beckett’s favourite gameof abstraction a Geulincxian lack of causality, the “ethical yoyo”(p. 64)16 between themselves.

It is precisely Murphy’s failure to heed the maxim from theEthics during this game that is his undoing. He does not realise hehas no power, he is worth nothing, and cannot thereby influenceMr Endon, despite Mr Endon’s being, in other contexts, “voted byone and all the most biddable little gaga in the entire institution”(p. 134). Murphy tries desperately to give up his pieces throughoutthe game, hoping for reaction. He moves a knight into a losing po-sition three times, and tries valiantly with “the ingenuity of de-spair” (p. 137) at moves 27 and 41 to sacrifice his queen and stillMr Endon’s non-reaction is unshakeable. Just as Mr Endon sawnot Murphy but the chessy eye, similarly he follows the abstractrules of chess in a further abstraction. He does not follow themcompetitively, instead he adheres to them only in so far as they al-low him to re-arrange a monochrome and symmetrical visual pat-tern of his own devising.

15 The picture taken from the Daily Sketch of July 1st 1936 appears on thecover of Ackerley’s Demented Particulars. Beckett appears to have been verykeen on the picture, twice asking George Reavey about it. On the 13th January1938 he asked succinctly about apes, and four days later expressed his disap-pointment that their possibility had faded (see footnote n. 4).

16 Described in Ackerley 2004 (p. 120) as a reference to Geulincx’s Ethics,specifically to the Cartesian problem addressed therein of the interaction betweenmind and body, rather than to mediation between good or bad moral qualities.


Mr Endon’s turns taken, the claim being that we cannot real-ly call them his responses, during Murphy’s abject begging forquittance are described as his “irresistible game” (p. 137) whenrather than taking Murphy’s queen he returns a knight to a cor-ner square, revealing his pieces in a diabolical and hugely comicstrict plan of symmetry. Murphy’s pieces are of course in utter dis-array. Murphy is by turns confused, imitative, desperate, then sui-cidal, finally giving up the ghost when forced into a winning po-sition by Mr Endon’s only possible but illegal final move into theclosest it is possible to get (conceding the irreversible forwardmovement of two pawns) to his original symmetry. It is a movethat would “indicate once and for all whether Mr Endon per-ceives him” (Ackerley 2004, p. 194).

Geulincx wrote in Ethics:

We have no power to affect either our own or any other body; thisis perfectly obvious from our consciousness alone, and no sane manwould deny it.

(Geulincx 2006, p. 243)

This Cartesian founding principle “obvious from conscious-ness alone” is Geulincx’s clear and distinct realisation of ignoranceand impotence. Murphy does not realise he has no power to af-fect Mr Endon. Instead his hubris prolongs the fruitless manoeu-vres in a game he can only lose. In his frustration we might wellhear an echo of Geulincx’s realisation that “I am a mere specta-tor of a machine whose workings I can neither adjust nor readjust.I neither construct nor demolish anything here” (Geulincx 2006,p. 333).

If only Murphy would try the alternative approach of Geu -lincxian quietism. Such stoicism as this might enable him to beatthe catatonics at their own game. He should cast his eyes with hu-mility upon his impotence, and realise that where he cannot act,where he is worth nothing, he should not try to act. There, wherethere is truly “nothing to be done” (Waiting for Godot, p. 11), hemight stand a chance of failing better.

Though of course beating the catatonics at their own game is al-so a danger. For Murphy, seeking to avoid the perhaps occasional-ist “occasions of fiasco” (Murphy, p. 101) in his little world, it



was not enough to want nothing where he was worth nothing [...]. Ithad not been enough and showed no signs of being enough. These dis-positions [...] could sway the issue in the desired direction, but notclinch it.

(Murphy, p. 102)

Murphy is not a humble man. “How will [a humble man] lis-ten to what Reason says if he listens only to what he himself says”(Geulincx 2006, p. 220), Geulincx asked rhetorically. Besottedwith his own company, in the words of Malraux, Murphy “seeksout his own”, listening only to himself or his vice-existers, andforcing the oblivion. Recalling Geulincx’s terminology in a waysimilar to the published letter to Duthuit cited above, Murphywas previously transfixed by a “vicarious autology he had beenenjoying [...] in little Mr Endon and all the other proxies” (Mur-phy, p. 107). However, his egotistical self-regard will get the bet-ter of him and when his own little inferno engulfs him it will bewhile he is in thrall to himself and his self-defeating attempts towill his own quietist will-lessness.

“What is more tedious to a man than living!” (TCD MS10971/6/1 in Feldman 2004, p. 35417) Beckett transcribed fromQuestions Concerning Disputations, and Murphy might concur,spurning the fanciful notion of a mystical occasionalist God whocontinually sticks his oar in, who amounts to no more than “TheChaos and Waters Facilities Act” (Murphy, p. 100) of ChapterNine. Murphy is revolted at the attribution of any talents he mighthave to anything outside himself. Farces and disasters astrologycan keep, but little successes such as those had with the patientsare hoarded for his self.

Following the collapse of the game, Murphy stares into the un-responsive cornea of Mr Endon and sees, “horribly reduced, ob-scured and distorted, his own image” (p. 140). This instant ofnon-perception has been described as a “Geulincxian critique of


17 This is a translation made for Feldman’s unpublished thesis Sourcing“Aporetics”: An empirical study on philosophical influences in the development ofSamuel Beckett’s writing, Oxford Brooks University, 2004. It derives from theLatin “An levando vitae taedio, vario magis quam stabilis vitae ratio conducat?”in Geulincx, 1891-1893, p. 118. The question is one of a number that Geulincxdebated in public. On these public oratories see Land, 1891, pp. 224-225.


the Proustian moment, which redeems nothing” (Ackerley 2004,p. 202). Murphy is horrifyingly still himself, unwilling to let go hisapperception of sanity. Such is a price the variously impecunioushero just cannot afford. James O’Hara describes how “this is thepose of Narcissus, bent over the stream to see himself” (O’Hara1997, p. 60). This is the point at which Murphy in his narcissisticway blooms. To pursue the analogy briefly, if Mr Endon is Mur-phy’s Echo, with his psychosis perhaps a little of Juno’s curse, thisis only after Murphy has in vain and in vanity tried to himself bethe echo of Mr Endon’s moves in the game. However, Murphywill be “melted, consumed by the fire inside him” (Ovid, Meta-morphoses, p. 116) as is the fate of Narcissus. The game has un-masked him as the selfish Narcissus, not, as he hoped, the selflessEcho. By the following day he will be dead and dust, even moreliterally “a speck in Mr Endon’s unseen” (Murphy, p. 140).

The documenter of Three Centuries of Geulincx Research, H.J.de Vleeschauwer, claims that Geulincx’s rightful place shouldhave been noted in the 1950s along with Pascal as a Christian Ex-istentialist. Such a valiant ambivalence fascinated Beckett, as evi-denced by his correspondence. But Murphy, unable to resignhimself to the knowledge that “whatever I do stays within me; and[...] nothing I do passes into my body, or any other body, or any-thing else” (Geulincx 2006, p. 331), persists with the misguidedbelief that there might be something to express in this game.There is not, and for Murphy as for anyone else Geulincx wouldoffer the simple restraint: “It is vain to attempt what I cannot un-dertake” (Geulincx 2006, p. 339).

Perhaps Murphy’s falling short of Geulincx’s maxims of ab-stinence finds a kind of parallel in Beckett himself not finishingEthics, as he wrote “not even in Lent” (Letter to Thomas Mac-Greevy, 9th April 1936, in Engelberts, Frost and Maxwell 2006, p.145). However, in providing a much-needed injection of ideasand energy into the completion of Murphy, Geulincx contributedto Beckett’s overcoming a severe case of writer’s frustration, if notblock. It was to finishing Murphy Beckett turned after Easter thisyear18. By the 6th of May he would be turning down other work as


18 Easter fell on 12th April in 1936.


he was too busy with the novel19, and producing a completed firstdraft of it only four weeks later (by 9th June).

In the way Geulincx becomes perhaps incorporated into thisone scene in particular he is shown as integral to the developmentfrom Murphy to the major middle period works. The chess gameelaborates the theme of closed systems already in Murphy20, in thisinstance given a Geulincxian impetus. Yet in its exceptionality inthe novel as a game, an enumeration of specific moves, the chessgame looks forward quite explicitly to the many troubles to whichBeckett will subject his next protagonist, Watt.

Moreover, it is the bombastic version of Watt appearing to-wards the end of Mercier et Camier who will, as Pilling has readit, announce Beckett’s future horizons: “It falls to Watt to predictwhat Beckett will attempt in narrative terms when, as soon, Mer -cier et Camier will be done with” (Pilling 1997, p. 209):

Il naîtra, il est né de nous, dit Watt, celui qui n’ayant rien ne vou-dra rien, sinon qu’on lui laisse le rien qu’il a.

(Mercier et Camier, p. 198)

One shall be born, said Watt, one is born of us, who having noth-ing will wish for nothing, except to be left the nothing he hath.

(Mercier and Camier, p. 114)

The masterworks of voice, the first-person narrators and theirnarratives will be born from the ashes of Mercier, Camier, Watt,and Murphy. We are left with interesting questions: Why isWatt’s announcement framed in the famous terms borrowedfrom Geulincx? And, more broadly, what are we to make of Beck-ett’s fixing on the single maxim in correspondence over such along period of time, given that his works develop in so many dif-


19 See Pilling 2006, p. 57. Beckett refused further translation work of Éluard.

20 Those adumbrated by Ruby Cohn as “the park, Miss Dwyer’s figure, Mur-phy’s mind, and the horse leech’s daughter are all closed systems” (Cohn 1962,p. 61). It is a tightly bordered zone where any “quantum of wantum”, theamount of desire and suffering (in a game where these equate perhaps to win-ning and losing) is self-contained. Closed systems by definition do not leak, andserve well as playthings of the monomaniacal, and the insane.


ferent ways in the thirty years following Murphy? Geulincx re-mains with Beckett, resurfacing by name in “The End”, Molloy,and The Unnamable, and as has been discussed by Uhlmann, im-plicitly in shifting ways in later works such as “Rockaby” andFilm21. He is undoubtedly only one of Beckett’s numerous so-called intertextual “bits of pipe”22, but he is an important and in-triguing one, still yet to be fully explored.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Works by Samuel Beckett

Letter to Thomas MacGreevy, undated [July 1930]. [Published inJames Knowlson, 1996, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beck-ett, Bloomsbury, London, p. 118.]

Letter to Thomas MacGreevy, August 1931, TCD MS 10402/24.[Published in Matthijs Engelberts, Everett Frost and Jane Maxwell(editors), 2006, Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui (Notes Di-verse[s] Holo: Catalogues of Beckett’s Reading Notes and OtherManuscripts at Trinity College Dublin, With Supporting Essays),XVI, p. 21.]

Letter to Thomas MacGreevy, 9th January 1936, TCD MS 10402/85.[Published in Engelberts, Frost and Maxwell (editors), 2006, SamuelBeckett Today / Aujourd’hui (Notes Diverse[s] Holo) cit., p. 144.]

Letter to George Reavey, 9th January 1936, HRHRC. [Published inMartha D. Fehsenfeld and Lois M. Overbeck (editors), 2009, TheLetters of Samuel Beckett: 1929-1940, Cambridge University Press,Cambridge, p. 295.]

Letter to Thomas MacGreevy, 16th January 1936, TCD MS 10402/86.[Published in Engelberts, Frost and Maxwell (editors), 2006,Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui (Notes Diverse[s] Holo) cit., p.144, and in Knowlson, 1996, Damned to Fame cit., p. 219.]

Letter to Thomas MacGreevy, February 6th 1936, TCD MS 10402.[Published in Chris Ackerley, 2004, Demented Particulars: The An-notated Murphy, Journal of Beckett Studies Books, Florida, p. 13.]


21 See Uhlmann 2006, pp. 78-85.22 Beckett quoted in conversation. See Knowlson 1983, p. 16.


Letter to Thomas MacGreevy, 5th March 1936, TCD MS 10402/91.[Published in Engelberts, Frost and Maxwell (editors), 2006,Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui (Notes Diverse[s] Holo) cit., p.145.]

Letter to Arland Ussher, 25th March 1936. [Published in MatthewFeldman, 2006, Beckett’s Books: A Cultural History of Samuel Beck-ett’s “interwar notes”, Continuum, New York, p. 132.]

Letter to Thomas MacGreevy, 9th April 1936, TCD MS 10402/93.[Published in Engelberts, Frost and Maxwell (editors), 2006,Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui (Notes Diverse[s] Holo) cit., p.145.]

Murphy, 1938, John Calder, London 1963.Letter to George Duthuit, 9th March 1949. [Published in Stanley E.

Gontarski and Anthony Uhlmann (editors), 2006, Beckett afterBeckett, University Press of Florida, Gainesville, p. 19.]

Letter to Dr. Erich Franzen, 17th February 1954. [Published in An-thony Uhlmann, 2006, Samuel Beckett and the Philosophical Image,Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p. 78.]

Molloy, 1955, in Trilogy. Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable (1955,1956 and 1958), John Calder, London 1959 [2003], pp. 5-176.

Malone Dies, 1956, in Trilogy cit., pp. 177-289.Trilogy. Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable (1955, 1956 and 1958),

John Calder, London 1959 [2003].Watt, 1953, John Calder, London 1963.Mercier et Camier, 1970, Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris.Mercier and Camier, 1974, Calder and Boyars, London.The Complete Dramatic Works, 1986, Faber and Faber, London

[1990].Cohn, Ruby (editor), 1983, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dra-

matic Fragment by Samuel Beckett, John Calder, London.Fehsenfeld, Martha Dow and Lois More Overbeck (editors), 2009,

The Letters of Samuel Beckett: 1929-1940, Cambridge UniversityPress, Cambridge.

Works by Arnold Geulincx

Metaphysica vera, 1691. [Metaphysics, Christoffel Press, Wisbech1999.]

Ruler, van Han, Anthony Uhlmann, and Martin Wilson (editors),2006, Ethics – with Samuel Beckett’s Notes, Brill, Leiden.



Land, Jan Pieter Nicolaas (editor), 1891-1893, Arnoldi GeulincxOpera Philosophica, Apud Nijhoff, Hagae Comitum.

Criticism

Ackerley, Chris, 2004, Demented Particulars: The Annotated Murphy,Journal of Beckett Studies Books, Tallahassee (Florida).

Casanova, Pascale, 2006, Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary Revo-lution, Verso, London.

Cohn, Ruby, 1962, Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut, Rutgers Uni-versity Press, New Brunswick (New Jersey).

De Lattre, Alain, 1970, Arnold Geulincx, Seghers, Paris.De Vleeschauwer, Herman J., 1957, Three Centuries of Geulincx Re-

search: A Bibliographic Survey, Communications of the Universityof South Africa, Pretoria.

Dobrez, L. A. C., 1986, The Existential and Its Exits: Literary andPhilosophical Perspectives on the Works of Beckett, Ionesco, Genetand Pinter, Athlone Press, London.

Engelberts, Matthijs, Everett Frost and Jane Maxwell (editors), 2006,Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui (Notes Diverse[s] Holo: Cata-logues of Beckett’s Reading Notes and Other Manuscripts at TrinityCollege Dublin, With Supporting Essays), XVI, 2006.

Feldman, Matthew, 2004 (unpublished thesis), Sourcing “Aporetics”:An Empirical Study on Philosophical Influences in the Developmentof Samuel Beckett’s Writing, Oxford Brooks University, 2004.

Idem, 2006, Beckett’s Books: A Cultural History of Samuel Beckett’s“interwar notes”, Continuum, New York.

Gontarski, Stanley E., and Anthony Uhlmann (editors), 2006, Beckettafter Beckett, University Press of Florida, Gainesville.

Harmon, Maurice (editor), 1998, No Author Better Served: The Corre-spondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider, Harvard Univer-sity Press, Cambridge (Massachusetts).

Harvey, Lawrence, 1970, Samuel Beckett, Poet and Critic, PrincetonUniversity Press, Princeton (New Jersey).

Kennedy, Sighle, 1971, Murphy’s Bed: A Study of Real Sources and Sur-Real Associations in Samuel Beckett’s First Novel, Bucknell Uni-versity Press, Lewisburg (Pennsylvania).

Knowlson, James, 1983, “Beckett’s ‘Bits of Pipe’” in Beja, Morris,Stanley E. Gontarski, and Pierre Astier (editors), Samuel Beckett:Humanistic Perspectives, 1983, Ohio State University Press (Ohio),pp. 16-25.




Idem, 1996, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, Blooms-bury, London.

Land, Jan Pieter Nicolaas, 1891, “Arnold Geulincx and His Works”,in Mind, vol. 16, n. 62, April 1891, pp. 223-242.

O’Hara, James Donald, 1997, Samuel Beckett’s Hidden Drives: Struc-tural Uses of Depth Psychology, University Press of Florida,Gainesville.

Pilling, John, 1997, Beckett before Godot, Cambridge University Press,Cambridge.

Idem, 2006, A Samuel Beckett Chronology, Palgrave Macmillan, Bas-ingstoke.

Uhlmann, Anthony, 2006, Samuel Beckett and the Philosophical Image,University of Cambridge Press, Cambridge.

Idem, 2006, “Samuel Beckett and the Occluded Image”, in Gontar skiand Uhlmann (editors), 2006, Beckett after Beckett, cit., pp. 79-97.

Idem, 2004, “‘A Fragment of a Vitagraph’: Hiding and Revealing inBeckett, Geulincx, and Descartes”, in Anthony Uhlmann, SjefHouppermans, and Bruno Clément (editors), Samuel Beckett To-day / Aujourd’hui (After Beckett / D’Après Beckett), XIV, 2004, pp.341-356.

Weller, Shane, 2005, A Taste for The Negative: Beckett and Nihilism,Legenda, London.

Wood, Rupert, “Murphy, Beckett; Geulincx, God” in Journal of Beck-ett Studies, II, 2, 1993, pp. 27-51.

Other works cited

Horace, The Satires of Horace and Persius, Penguin, London 2005.Ovid, Metamorphoses, Penguin, London 2004.Windelband, Wilhelm, 1907, A History of Philosophy (Second Edi-

tion), Macmillan, London.


Documents

Towards an Analysis of Geulincx and the Ur-Watt