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SAMUEL BECKETT AND THE SINIC WORLD
In 1952, Beckett displayed his direct knowledge of Buddhism in his essay
Henri Hayden, homme-peintre: "Gautama [...] said that one is fooling oneself
if one says that T exists, but that in saying it does not exist, one is fooling
oneself no less."? This pronounal anxiety, which persists in later prose works
such as Company, is evident in That Time as voice C accuses the protagonist
of never “being able to say I” to himself.“ The interesting reconstitution of
Gautama’s argument furthers an Eastern reading of the play, as the inability
of the protagonist to assert himself grammatically declares its origins in
Buddhist existential and grammatical doubt. The First Truth of the Buddha
that “existence is suffering” is expressed as the alliterative line, “the womb
worst of all,” which immediately precedes the voice of youth’s reference to
“that old Chinaman.” This collocation not only suggests Beckett’s awareness
of the myth that Lao-Tzu spent eighty-one years in his mother’s womb, but
also that the protagonist is the “old Chinaman” reincarnate, a fellow sufferer
in “another time another place.”
In 1971, three years before he began writing the play, Beckett was shown
“a volume of Zen art that included a few drawings of circles” by Yasunari
Takahashi. Beckett’s interest in the Enso circles, which are symbolic of the
idea of “mushin,” a state of being without mind, demonstrate an ongoing
engagement with Eastern culture and tradition. That Time offers an
imaginative reconstruction of the Ensö, as the ordering of the three voices of
youth, maturity, and old age is suggestive of the cyclical nature of existence.
Schopenhauer’s idea that “there can be no beginning nor end to the Universe,
neither Cosmogony nor Eschatology” is one of the indirect sources through
which Beckett assimilated this Buddhist concept of cyclical time into his late
play, which asks “was there any other time but that time.”®’ The unpunctuated
prose further suggests that the text is a written reconstruction of a freehand
circle of enlightenment, like that of a Zen priest.
With That Time, therefore, Beckett moves closer towards the Chinese
aesthetic of “inner emptiness.” The speaker’s mysterious final utterance, “gone
in no time,” recalls Pliimacher and Schopenhauer’s Buddhist emphasis on the
transience of existence, whilst the last remaining sounds, “the old breath”
and “the leaves turning,” indicate a momentary unification of a “pure man”
with nature, and a peculiar acceptance of the “great shroud,” “the void” of
® Beckett: Disjecta, 146., my translation.
64 Beckett: That Time, 390.
65 Dauer: Schopenhauer, 12; Beckett: That Time, 390.
66 Ibid., 394.
§7 Yasunari Takahashi: On “Mindlessness”: Beckett, Japan, and the Twentieth Century, in Angela
B. Moorjani — Carola Veit (eds.): Samuel Beckett: Endlessness in the Year 2000, Amsterdam,
Rodopi, 2001, 38-42.
68 Ibid., 38.
6 Dauer: Schopenhauer, 30; Beckett: That Time, 395.