ABSTRACT
Art, love and nature are sources of meaning, and sources of pleasure, though meanings and pleasures are frail, transient, scarred, scotched and annihilated in Samuel Beckett’s fiction. Even though and even as they disappear or are discredited, these so-called solaces give his strange world a familiar density. Beckett’s art is an unflaggingly self-reflective activity, and the arts he is chiefly concerned with are theatrical and literary. His plays dramatise and discuss dramatic action, like dialogue, entertainment, scenes, continuous action, performance, exposition, and final curtains. H.Bergson defines comedy as depending on ‘the momentary anaesthesia of the heart’ and his metaphor applies to L. Sterne, at times to Swift, but never to Beckett. Rank as love is, for Beckett’s people, it behaves remarkably like love: suffers like love, consoles like love, and is not exempt from dirtiness, ugliness, smelliness, sickness and death. Nature in Beckett is always uncertain, then, but the uncertainties shift.
