Still: Samuel Beckett’s Quietism

by Andy Wimbush

In the 1930s, a young Samuel Beckett confessed to a friend that he had been living his life according to an ‘abject self-referring quietism’. Andy Wimbush argues that ‘quietism’―a philosophical and religious attitude of renunciation and will-lessness―is a key to understanding Beckett’s artistic vision and the development of his career as a fiction writer from his early novels Dream of Fair to Middling Women and Murphy to late short prose texts such as Stirrings Still and Company . Using Beckett’s published and archival material, Samuel Beckett’s Quietism shows how Beckett distilled an understanding of quietism from the work of Arthur Schopenhauer, E.M. Cioran, Thomas à Kempis, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and André Gide, before turning it into an aesthetic that would liberate him from the powerful literary traditions of nineteenth-century realism and early twentieth-century high modernism. Quietism, argues Andy Wimbush, was for Beckett a lifelong preoccupation that shaped his perspectives on art, relationships, ethics, and even notions of salvation. But most of all it showed Beckett a way to renounce authorial power and write from a position of impotence, ignorance, and incoherence so as to produce a new kind of fiction that had, in Molloy’s words, the ‘tranquility of decomposition’.

272 pages, Paperback

Published August 4, 2020

About the author

Dr Andy Wimbush is a tutor, university lecturer, writer, and researcher based in London. He specialises in the study of Samuel Beckett and the relationship between literature and religion since 1870. His writing has been published in various academic books and journals. His first monograph, Still: Samuel Beckett’s Quietism was published in 2020.

He holds a PhD and a BA in English from the University of Cambridge, and an MA in Environmental Politics from King's College London. He is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Andy has taught literary criticism, academic writing skills, and film studies at the University of Cambridge since 2012. He is currently a course convenor and lecturer at the university's Institute of Continuing Education.

Reviews

[Bart Stouten · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great publication, a marvelous treatment of the all-important link between Beckett and quietism, truly essential for understanding his work. It is surprising enough that no one else thought of such an undertaking any earlier. Andy Wimbush has delivered a powerful analysis. Loved the references to Schopenhauer and Gide. I ordered the paperback in Belgium, found it rather expensive (almost fifty euros for less than 300 pages), but I enjoyed every word of it. Excellent work.