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PATRICK ÁRMSTRONG
Kanze had good reason to want the chance to “think it over and [re]produce”
a version of Beckett’s work that brought out the striking, though not at first
glance obvious, Eastern elements.?
Beckett looked to the East as part of an attempt to return to the origins
of thought and philosophy. His fascination with epistemology and ancient
philosophy led to an engagement with Chinese thought and mythology,
bringing to mind Hamm’s love of “the old questions, the old answers” in
Endgame.‘ This interest in “the old,” the implicitly pre-Christian, is echoed
in That Time, as the protagonist revises and recalls his, and civilization’s,
past events, repeatedly evoking the “old scenes,” the “old rounds,” and the
"old breath." This essay will seek to expand upon John Pilling’s suggestive
point that “anyone disappointed of Christian consolation in the way Beckett
has been seen to be, is bound to turn (if not for religious satisfaction, at least
in the spirit of returning to the origins of thought) to the writings of the pre¬
Socratic philosophers.”® Beckett’s reading of Eastern sources demonstrates
an indirect return to the “origins of thought” through Eastern, pre-Christian
philosophers, such as Buddha, Lao-Tzu, and Chuang-Tzu.
Ex Cathezra, the 1934 review of Ezra Pound’s essay collection Make It New,
indicates that Beckett was aware of Ernest Fenollosa’s significant essay on the
“Chinese Written Character.”’ In Fenollosa’s comparative study of Chinese signs
and poetry, which Pound first published in 1919, he declares: “[T]he Chinese
have been idealists, and experimenters in the making of great principles; their
history opens a world of lofty aim and achievement, parallel to that of the
ancient Mediterranean peoples.”? Beckett, too, would become interested in this
idealism and in the “lofty aim and achievement” of the Sinic world. In particular,
the mystical teachings of Lao-Tzu and Chuang-Tzu seem to have appealed to
the theologically disillusioned and philosophically inquisitive author. Two of
his closest friends in Paris, the artists André Masson and Georges Duthuit,
were fascinated by the kind of early Sinic art, culture, and philosophy that
interested Pound and Fenollosa.’ In Three Dialogues (1949), a written debate
between Duthuit and Beckett on contemporary art, Duthuit discusses Masson’s
3 Kanze: Writings, 178.
Samuel Beckett: Endgame, in The Complete Dramatic Works, London, Faber and Faber,
1986, 110.
Samuel Beckett: That Time, in The Complete Dramatic Works, 388-395.
John Pilling: Samuel Beckett, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976, 123.
Samuel Beckett: Ex Cathezra, in Disjecta, 77.
Ernest Fenollosa — Ezra Pound: The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: An
Ars Poetica, in Haun Saussy, Jonathan Stalling, and Lucas Klein (eds.): The Chinese Written
Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition, New York, Fordham University, 2008,
58.
See James Knowlson: Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, London, Bloomsbury,
1996, 369-371.
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