‘What I want is the straws, flotsam, etc.’: Beckett and the Nominalist Ethic of Humility

Abstract

In the ‘German Letter’ of 1937 Beckett hints that a ‘nominalist irony’ may be a necessary stage in his ultimate aim ‘to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind language’. As Beckett's letter attests, the perennial debate between Nominalism and Realism reached its height in the Scholastic period. Matthew Feldman has shown convincingly that Beckett's own ‘Philosophy Notes’ from the early 1930s onwards revolve specifically around the doctrine of Nominalism. With its internal threats of atheism, pessimism, and nihilism, Nominalism certainly seems like a good fit for Beckett. However, aligning Beckett too closely with Nominalism obscures both the ‘irony’ that his letter shackles to the term, and the fact that Beckett always observed the oxymoronic duties of a ‘systematic sceptic’. Beckett could no more accept the ‘authentic’ particular, than he could the ‘transcendent’ universal. However, far from observing the silence of this mute impasse between the particular and universal, Beckett felt keenly the obligation to express. This essay explores how Beckett transformed his meticulous study of the controversy of universals into an aesthetic strategy: the Nominalist ethic. Examining text and manuscript, this essay argues that Beckett's growing sense of humility, shaped by his reading on Christian mystic Thomas à Kempis' humilitas, encouraged him to embrace Nominalist particulars (the straws, flotsam, births, deaths etc.) as entities of the lowest ontological kind. In the bare particulars of the Nominalist ethic he found a minimally acceptable literary method of going on, without going on. This essay will address the three main ways that the Nominalist ethic manifests in Beckett's writing: in his pronounced linguistic scepticism, in his attack on anthropomorphism, and, finally, in the casual inertness that is a as a condition of his writing.