Samuel Beckett and the Nonhuman - Introduction

What is it about?

As he crawls through mud and slime, the subhuman or, better, ambivalently human narrator of Comment c’est / How It Is (1961, 1964) turns to mathematical figures (chiffres in French) “when all else fails” to soothe himself with the predictability of rational calculation: “two and two, twice two and so on” (59). He mentions his “species” a handful of times in the spare and syntax-less novel, often in the context of a “loss of species,” or else he describes clinging to and never quite falling from his species: “hanging on by the finger-nails to one’s species” (29). Here we find a narrator who situates himself at the unstable limit of what is human. That Beckett should express ambivalence about the human, in the voices of myriad narrators as well as in his letters and essays, should come as little surprise after the barbarism of the Second World War and the ensuing wave of postwar humanism in France, about which Beckett was famously anti-pathic. Yet Beckett’s praise of the “inhuman” in Jack B. Yeats’s paintings—their “petrified insight into one’s ultimate hard irreducible inorganic singleness”— and his relief at Cézanne’s rejection of anthropomorphism emerge in letters from the 1930’s, revealing that Beckett’s gravitation toward the nonhuman predates the war (536; 222; see also Rabaté 2016, 41). Interest in the nonhuman in relation to the human spans Beckett’s long career, culminating in the “worsening” of the form of the human in Worstward Ho (1983).

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