“Beckett and ‘l’ordre naturel’: The Universal Grammar of Comment c’est/How It Is.”...

BECKETT AND "L'ORDRE NATUREL": The Universal Grammar of "Comment c'est/How It Is"Author(s): Anthony CordingleySource: Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui, Vol. 18, "All Sturm and no Drang": Beckett andRomanticism, Beckett at Reading 2006 (2007), pp. 185-199Published by: Editions Rodopi B.V.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25781796 .

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BECKETT AND "L'ORDRE NATUREL": The Universal Grammar of Comment c'est/How It Is

Anthony Cordingley

A foundational myth of the clarity and precision of French prose, the theory of French word order "l'ordre naturel" grew out of Aristotelian grammars and

sought its justification in Cartesian metaphysics, epistemology and physiology. Ironically, Beckett's "narrator/narrated" of Comment c'est/How It Is uses a tattered syntax to insist that his discourse is a recitation in "the natural order"

(l'ordre naturel) of the voice in his head, "the other above in the light" (l'autre dans la lumiere). The aspirations of the "I" below to imitate his mysterious "ancient voice" interlace with the text's allusions to Enlightenment philosophy of mind and language, producing its unique, albeit debilitated, "geometric

method."

9a se voyait merde pour la grammaire

(Manuscript "ms" of Comment c'est; Beckett 2001, 355)

"je cite dans l'ordre naturel," "I quote in the natural order." When time

and again the narrator/narrated1 of Comment c 'est/How It Is repeats and

varies this phrase he is recalling an intellectual history stretching from

the Latin ordo naturalis to l'ordre naturel of French and the lesser

known English natural order. The narrator/narrated's "natural order," and its temporal corollary, "before Pirn with Pirn after Pirn," evokes

orders Aristotelian, Middle Age Christian, Dantesque and Miltonian.

Beckett's irony is always polyvalent, yet the foregrounding of syntax in

the fragmented language of Comment c 'est/How It Is directs attention

to a linguistic condition. 'Speaking' in his rudimentary syntax, the

narrator/narrated evokes a tradition in the philosophy of language which once postulated the analytic precision of word order and its

correspondence with the 'pure' operations of the mind. Enlightenment Rationalism understood the relationships between man, the soul, the

world and God as reflected in, and in some instances mediated by, the

organisation of language. Categories of grammar, syntax and the



Anthony Cordingley

rhetorical deployment of words were each laden with philosophical consequences. In discourses about language in France, this polemic centred on the supposed ordre naturel of French word order. After

sketching the Rationalist architecture of Comment c 'est/How It Is, this

discourse will be located within that of the narrator/narrated. To this

end the "Philosophy Notes" which Beckett made between mid-1932 and mid-1934 are an invaluable source for his knowledge of continental

Enlightenment thought.2 There is a purported dualism at the core of the novel: the

articulating "I" claims to be nothing more than the mouthpiece of "the

other above in the light" (l'autre dans la lumiere), whose discourse enters his "ancient voice" (voix ancienne), as the voice of memory. The "I" struggles to repeat his memory, snatching images of his "ancienne"

life, interspersed with learned allusions and literary echoes. Yet, in the

underworld of mud, a scene of torture is imagined. The "I" is alone but

expects to meet a character named Pirn, whom he will torture. Pirn will

eventually leave, and the "I" knows that he will then be tortured by Bom, who approaches him from behind, as Pirn had been 'discovered.'

During their journeys each "soul" (43) must travel with a sack. A

parody of a parable, each sack contains tins of fish which offer the

physical and spiritual nutrition for life's voyage. Not until very late in

the novel is the logical flaw discovered, "very pretty but not right something wrong something quite wrong" (141): if Pirn leaves his sack to the "I," then he must go forth without a sack, and the divine and pre established order of souls and sacks is out of kilter. As in Leibniz's

Monadology, "it's regulated thus we're regulated thus" (143). The narrator/narrated launches into a trenchant mathematical proof to

rectify the error in his system in the fashion of a Cartesian Rationalist -

in the "Philosophy Notes" Beckett underlined Descartes' "proofs of existence of God" (TCD MS 10967/183r).

The first solution proposed is simply to multiply the figures and sacks ahead of Pirn: "as long as I with Pirn the other with Bern a hundred thousand prone glued two by two" (145). Yet a straight line with limits won't solve the problem of the figure at the head of the procession getting his sack of spiritual provisions, "something wrong there," and a new "solution" is proposed: the "closed curve" (151). For some 54 paragraphs a circular form is tested until it too is found to be unsatisfactory because he who started out at number one will be

deprived of his victim when he reaches his original position. Just as God's grace is expressed in a harmonious ratio of sacks to souls, there

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Beckett and "l'ordre naturel1

can never be disequilibrium in the balance of torturers and victims: between fifty million or four, "not a single one among us be wronged" (161). The "justice" ordained from above demands that there never be an imbalance between evil and sacrifice. This theological position is

expressed mathematically: "we do not revolve / that is above in the

light where their space is measured here the straight line" (159). Yet this new line is without beginning or ending, "neither head nor tail"

(161), it is infinite. The realm of geometric and measurable truths accords with the perfect language of Descartes' immaterial mind, "that

is above in the light," while the infinity of extension in the world below is consistent with Cartesian corpuscular theory as recorded by Beckett

in the "Philosophy Notes": "Bodies are parts of space, limitations of the

universal extension. Elements of corporeal world corpuscles, realiter

indivisible, mathematically infinitely divisible. Thus, for Descartes,

impossibility of empty space and infinitude of corporeal world" (TCD MS 10967/187v). Beckett allows this strain of Cartesianism to exist alongside the novel's allusions to Democritus' atomism - whose

"infinite waste"3 is alluded to in the "slime" (19, 61, 103, 281) and "primeval mud" (9) which sustains consciousness (albeit contradicting infinite divisibility in positing the material reality of the void and indivisible atoms). As dispersing Democritean atoms in the "infinite

waste," or as infinitely divisible corpuscles, the "I" is deprived of its

transcendent cogito: "no one here knows himself it's the place without

knowledge whence no doubt it's peerlessness" (159). Garin Dowd has convincingly demonstrated Leibniz's influence

on Worm, the "monade nue" of The Unnamable (Dowd 1-28), who

anticipates the larval states of Comment c'estlHow It Is. This naked

monad inhabits the lowest level of the divine hierarchy and is a being on the cusp of consciousness and reason. This goes some way to

explaining the linguistic condition of Comment c 'est/How It Is, where

the "I" below attempts to mirror the discourse of the one above, the

perfect and supreme Monad.4 Yet the imperfect sense of

hearing/memory of the one below results in a speech "ill-said ill heard

ill-recaptured ill-murmured" (3). On occasions there is a poetic resonance, organic beauty and a vivacity of images which is otherwise

deprived from the narrator/narrated's speech:

we are on the veranda smothered in verbena the scented sun

dapples the red tiles yes I assure you (15)

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Anthony Cordingley

The purported perfection of this listening is registered in that "yes I

assure you," while "veranda" and "verbena" echo the mimetic claim of

the "mutterings verbatim" (107) elsewhere, that which implies a perfect recitation of the voice above and the "ancient voice" of memory. The

synaesthesia of "scented sun dapples" infuses the language with a rare

warmth, and the presence of the mother in "smother" and the pun on

son/"sun" together form a frame of reference - though an apparently

oppressive one - to a different natural order of cycles outside the

languid procession through the mud and the mathematical series which otherwise preoccupy the discourse. Yet even this nature remains

dependent upon linguistic puns, effects and shades cast from the foliage of words. At other times, a stock of phatic repetitions sustain the narrative - that which Beckett refers to as "phrases chevilles et

charnieres" (padding or hinge phrases) (202) in manuscript notes collected in the genetic edition of Comment c 'est. Such phrases include the likes of "voice once without quaqua on all sides," "my life last state

last version," "left leg right leg push pull." The half born reason of the "monade nue" is also found in such imperfect "formulations" as:

Bom to the abandoned not me Bom you Bom we Bom but me

Bom you Pirn I to the abandoned not me Pirn you Pirn we Pirn but me Bom you Pirn something very wrong there

(147)

This confusion of pronouns occurs during the attempted proof to restore the pre-established harmony of sacks and souls. As abstract a

denomination as his own cogitoless "I," these names refer to conceptual bodies invented in order to accurately account for the relationship of this being to its world and deity. The present "formulation" becomes

part of an attempt to replicate the perfection of the "justice" ordained from the "other above in the light" through a language of philosophical verifiability. This project echoes historical efforts at construing a philosophical language.

Indebted to Windelband's A History of Philosophy (397), Beckett's "Philosophy Notes" record how Leibniz "was seriously of the

opinion that philosophical controversies would come to an end when a

philosophy could appear in as clear and certain a form as a mathematical calculation (De Scientia Universali seu Calculo

Philosophico: 1684)" (TCD MS 10967/184v). Beckett's interest was piqued by the comic value of the anecdotes of two such attempts, which

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Beckett and "l'ordre naturel"

Windelband relegates to footnotes in this chapter on the "Problem of Method." In the first instance, Beckett summarises:

Importance of geometrical method in Spinoza, and its

psychogenetic justification, this is its material (as distinct from formal) application. The order of ideas is conceived as identical

with order of things (Cf. Tschirnhausen's assertion that a complete definition of laughter would raise a laugh!).

(TCD MS 10967/184v)

What has been attributed to Beckett's use of Fritz Mauthner or set

theory in Watt may share its roots in Beckett's appreciation here of

"The order of ideas is conceived as identical with order of things." Thus

Beckett raises his laugh when the series of grammatical possibilities of

how to take out a dog's dinner becomes itself a dog's dinner. Beckett

continues, "Revival of syllogism in connection with geometrical method (Jung, Weigel, Christian Wolff Puffendorf)," which prompts his citation of Windelband's footnote containing Leibniz's poking fun

at this view, "where he proves 'more geometrical' in 60 propositions and demonstrations that Count Palatine of Neuburg must be chosen

King of the Poles!" (TCD MS 10967/184v). Copying out Windelband's

phrase "geometrical method" (397), Beckett changes it to "more

geometrical," echoing Windelband's description of Spinoza's "more

geometrico" (396; geometric order/manner) from the page before. In Comment c 'est/How It Is proper names appear to occupy a position in a

geometric series (... Bern Bom Pirn Pam Prim Krim Kram Skom Skum

...), their sequence seeking a model of consistent and precise exposition in language: "whence preparatives sudden series subject object subject

object" (9). Yet their logical premise is rather spurious, "m at the end

and one syllable the rest indifferent" (139), again inverting Sam's

'natural order' ma-, and in part three the terms are variously refigured in the hope of finding a "solution" to the problem of sacks and souls

(the delimited straight line, the "closed curve," the infinite straight line). In the section of the novel which Beckett extracted and reworked as a short prose piece, L'image, the pseudo-rhetoric of geometry

organises the very action of building the image/memory/narrative. The

discourse aspires to the status of a memory of "my life above in the

light," a scene in which the narrator/narrated is walking hand in hand

with a girlfriend, climbing a mountain:

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Anthony Cordingley

we let go our hands and turn about I dextrogyre she sinistro she

transfers the leash to her left hand and I the same instant to my right [...] the empty hands mingle the arms swing the dog has not

moved

feet splayed one hundred and thirty degrees fatuous half-smile to

posterior horizon

again about turn introrse at ninety degrees fleeting face to face

transfer of things mingling of arms stillness of dog (35)

again about turn introrse fleeting face to face transfer of things

swinging of arms silent relishing of sea and isles pivoting as one

[...] heads back front as though on an axle

(37)

my darling girl I bite she swallows my darling boy she bites I swallow

(39)

Peppered amongst this mechanistic exposition are terms of a quasi scientific register ("dextrogyre," "sinistro," "one hundred and thirty degrees," "posterior horizon" etcetera) which betray the "I"'s desire for his discourse to move with clearness and precision (Beckett's "more

geometric"). The process continued in Beckett's own listening to his ancient voice: when translating Comment c'est into How It Is such a

straightforward French phrase such as "demi-tour vers Pinterieur" (34) is rendered with the perfectly arcane "about turn introrse." This scene of the 'lovers' began with the "I" alone, his tongue in the mud taking mouthfuls of the malleable stuff, moving it about this mouth, letting it shape his words and help fashion a 'memory' of the world on high.

Without a line of communication to the immaterial mind, or supreme monad, the "I" uses his resources to imitate its perfection. The gradual intensification of the "geometric method" in this scene is amusing in the way comparable with Leibniz's joke proceeding syllogistically through its 60 propositions.

Making a cameo in this 'memory' is the Jansenist and

Occasionalist, Pere Malebranche, who casts his shadow over the couple and the girl's dog. Faithful to Beckett's understanding of Male

190




branche's Occasionalism and Geulincx's "two clocks theory," demonstrated in the "Philosophy Notes" (TCD MS 10967/189) and notes to Geulincx (332-33),5 the movements of the couple and the dog are synchronised despite the absence of physical causation between them. The episode turns burlesque when in front of the Rationalist priest, the dog tries to lick its penis but cannot, which occasions the comment "but we on the contrary" (37). Like most jokes in Beckett

there is a serious side and Malebranche's appearance reminds us of his

tirades in De La Recherche de la verite against the passions in

language. Malebranche riles against Montaigne's style because he believes it to be imbued with abuses of imagination which are designed to captivate readers at the expense of logical thinking; like Seneca,

Montaigne persuades without recourse to reason (Malebranche, Book

II, Part III). Beckett's scene is one of adolescent sexuality yet his

analytic sieve attempts (unsuccessfully) to filter almost all emotion

from the language. Climbing the summit may have afforded a view of a

stupendous sublime or even the infinite I AM, but once it is reached, the logic is simply reversed and the figures descend the mountain as if in rewind.

While Malebranche represents both a purely Rationalist attitude to mind and memory, Blaise Pascal, who was intimately involved with the

Jansenists of Port Royal, produced a Rationalism where the passions were accorded their place. Knowlson informs that Pascal's Pensees was

an enduring interest throughout Beckett's adult life, Beckett even

naming Pascal amongst his select group of "old chestnuts" (653). In the

"Philosophy Notes" Beckett registers the "geometric method" as a

"lever" for Pascal's mysticism (TCD MS 10967/184r). Pascal criticised

the assumption that an innate, rational language was superior to a

language rooted in lived experience. In Le discours sur les passions de

Vamour Pascal established what he considered to be two important dimensions to language. First, there is Vesprit geometrique and second, the Vesprit de finesse, two spirits which in turn correspond with the

geometric mind and the mind of finesse. Within the "spirit" or "mind"

of "finesse" the delimitation of thought extends no further than

psychological intuitions. In contrast, the geometric spirit follows rigidly established principles and thus assumes the form of a rational mode of

thought. In the Pensees, the geometric mind is found to be incapable of

grasping the multiplicity of lived experience (96). Furthermore, in L 'Art de persuader Pascal contrasts logical proof with a mode of thought

symbolised by the heart and determined by effect. While Pascal's

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Anthony Cordingley

fideism sets him apart from Descartes, he distinguishes Vesprit from le cozur (mind from heart) in a way analogous to Descartes' dichotomy of

Vesprit and matiere (mind and matter) (Ricken 30-32). Antoine Arnauld, referred to in Beckett's "Whoroscope," greatly

admired Pascal's innovation of "Vesprit de finesse" a fact which

inflamed Malebranche in the Recherche. Arnauld nevertheless

intensified the Cartesian method of solving philosophical problems with analytic rigour in La Logique ou, L'Art de penser (Port Royal Logic) of 1662. Windelband comments, and Beckett summarises in the

"Philosophy Notes":

Positive beginnings towards transformation of Cartesian method into Euclidean line of proof are found in Port-Royal logic and in logical treatises of Geulincx; but system of Spinoza the first to perfect this methodical schematism.

(TCD MS 10967/184v)

The "Philosophy Notes" suggest a connection between Spinoza's thinking and the burgeoning series found in Comment c 'est/How It Is and Watt, which is beyond the scope of this paper. Yet Beckett traced how "Descartes' disciples confused his mathematical philosophy with Euclidean rigidity of demonstration and elaborated its monistic

methodology into an ars demonstrandi" (TCD MS 10967/184v). Beckett follows Windelband in tracing through Lull, Bruno (an old interest of Beckett's via Joyce) and Hobbes, the idea of the "Lingua

Adamica" (philosophy in general algebraical formulae)," which culminates in "Leibniz's search for the characteristica universalis & a method of philosophical calculus" (TCD MS 10967/185r). In this section, Windelband explains how this impetus was shared by numerous thinkers of universal grammar in the seventeenth century (Becker, Dalgarn, Kircher and Wilkins):

Finally, the thought of expressing the fundamental metaphysical conceptions, and likewise the logical operations of their combination after the manner of the mathematical sign-language by definite characters, seemed to offer the possibility of writing a

philosophical investigation in general fomulae, and by this means raising it beyond the capability of being expressed in a definite language

- an effort toward a universally scientific language, a

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Beckett and "Pordre naturel"

"Lingua Adamica" which likewise appeared at the time of Leibniz in numerous supporters.

(Windelband 397-98)

There is no suggestion that Beckett was personally attracted to what Windelband terms "these strange endeavours" (398), yet they did appeal to his imagination. In Comment c'estlHow It Is, when the narrator/narrated repeats over and again "je cite dans l'ordre naturel" (I quote in the natural order), or "je le dis comme je l'entends dans l'ordre naturel" (I say it as I hear it in the natural order), he is evoking a theory of universal grammar which also "seemed to offer the possibility of

writing a philosophical investigation in general fomulae," that is, he claims to be speaking in "l'ordre nature!" of French syntax.6 "L'ordre nature!" refers to the order of subject-verb-object in French; in the context of grammatical relations it was a relatively common expression in Beckett's time and it remains so today. However, the justification for the naturalness of this order grew out of seventeenth century Rationalist

philosophy of mind. Its argument most basically states that discourse is the image of thought, and that if thought operates according to the logic of reason, then discourse will itself offer a picture of the mind, and illustrate the laws of reason. The theory is implicated in the complex polemics surrounding the Latin ordo naturalis, which has a long

history. Essentially, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the

reorganisation of ancient texts by scholars such as Roger Bacon, Johannes de Balbis and the Modist school of grammarians was

executed through the application of Aristotelian logic. Isolated on the

page was the maximum number of words playing a syntactical role

within the sentence consistent with minimizing graphic ambiguity. The

analytic order imposed upon the classical norms of ancient rhetorical

prose was known as the ordo naturalis. Hyperbaton, or departure from

ordinary word order, defined only vaguely by the ancients, was linked

by Insular grammarians to a violation of this "natural order" and of the

boundaries of word grouping or sectiones within sentences (Saenger 44-47; Thurot 341-50). The ordo artificialis or ordo artificiosus reflected the desire to find harmony in language and beauty in style; it was an 'artistic' divergence from the ordo naturalis (Lausberg 213-14).

While Latin had an innate flexibility of word order, the logical order of the ordo naturalis was fixed in a syntax following the subject

verb-object order. The coincidence of this order with the most common

of syntactical expressions in French allowed for the birth of a French

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Anthony Cordingley

theory of Vordre naturel. With a nationalistic pretext the argument was

used by moderns against ancients, but in the process it found its

philosophical justification in Cartesian metaphysics, epistemology and physiology (Ricken, 9-25). From Maupas to Grillet, the seventeenth century produced a group of authors willing to advance the regard of

the French language by linking it with the expression of this natural order. In the case of Vaugelas, categories of style usually associated with the ordo artificialis were redefined such that clarity of expression, defined as a correct arrangement of words, became "un des plus grand secret du style" (215). Logical order was thus the indispensable condition of the "clarte du langage que la Langue Fran?aise affecte sur

toutes les langues du monde" (235). This rather astonishing claim of the

superiority of French over all of the world's languages was soon to

receive more complex grounding in Rationalist theorisation. Antoine Arnauld and Claude Lancelot's Grammaire generale et raisonnee (Port Royal Grammar) is a seminal text in this justification; it sparked debate in the "Querelle des Anciens et Modernes," after which "l'expression ordre naturel etait done plus que la reminiscence d'une hypothese scolastique, venue a propos pour faire l'apologie de la langue nationale" (Ricken, 17). Uordre naturel continued to be one of the most discussed linguistic themes in French philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with the likes of Fontenelle,

Voltaire, Du Bos, Du Marsais, Condillac, Diderot, d'Alembert and Rousseau each weighing into the debate. By the end of the seventeenth

century dictionaries and grammars legitimised the popularity of the contention that French was the language of clarity, logic and precision, while the legacy of these ideas persisted in less obvious ways through discourses about French into Beckett's day (Meschonnic, 1991; 1999).

In rhythm and effect, the language of Comment c 'est/How It Is is poetic, yet the "I" in the mud avows his discourse (or rather is made to avow it) to be the simple repetition of the "other above" and his "ancient voice." Their altered transmission reflects his ill-hearing and

ill-saying and not a conscious ordo artificialis:

here then part one how it was before Pirn we follow I quote the natural order more or less my life last state last version what remains bits and scraps I hear it my life natural order more or less I learn it I quote a given moment long past vast stretch of time on

194




from there that moment and following not all a selection natural order vast tracts of time

(3) In Comment c'est this sequence proceeds as "je cite l'ordre [...] dans l'ordre [...] l'ordre naturel" (2): temporal relations are reducible to a

syntactical order. Indeed down below there is no light, darkness loses

its relationship to light becoming an "impenetrable dark" (9): the "I" is cut off from the light above and all 'natural' cycles. Hence the

foregrounding of syntax when with the 'natural light' of his own

reason, an analytic order of language, the "I" below strives hopelessly to reach the discourse of the one above.

Arnauld's Port Royal Logic offered a less Rationalist account of

mind and body than many post-Cartesians who, like Malebranche, extenuated Descartes' philosophical categories, further dividing mind

from body. Yet Beckett's noting the Logic's "Euclidean line of proof refers to its prescription for how to translate Rationalist principles in

practical life situations. The dogged logic of the narrator/narrated in

Comment c'est/How It Is follows such a trajectory, and in an article of

1976 Frederick Smith detects parallels between Watt's behaviour and

the absurdity of the Logic's prescriptions for rational everyday living. Smith admits that he has no direct evidence of Beckett reading the Port-Royal Logic, despite confirming that two editions of the original French (Lyon, 1671, and Amsterdam, 1685) and the second edition of Bayne's English translation were on the shelves at Trinity College Dublin when Beckett was there (100). Arnauld's Logic is, Smith

argues, "the missing link" (100) between Beckett's street-level comedy in Watt and the abstracted prose of seventeenth century philosophy and

logic. Watt is a twentieth century anti-logic: "Watt is the caricature of

Arnauld's practical Cartesian and Beckett's novel a handbook on how

not to approach life" (101). In this context it may not only be Watt's

thinking, but his language which displays evidence of this Cartesian

send-up. Like the narrator/narrated, he is prone to ungrammaticality and

inversion (hyperbaton), yet this becomes literal in the extreme when

Watt actually speaks his sentences in reverse, letter by letter. The

tendency of Hibernian English to syntactic inversion sharpened Beckett's ear to exactly this feature of language: on the 1st of December

1959, during the composition of Comment c'est, he wrote to Barbara

Bray of his decision to adapt Robert Pinget's La Manivelle into Irish

English and not "decent English" because the task was impossible

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Anthony Cordingley

"without the help of Irish rhythms and inversions" (TCD MS

10948/l/60r). Beckett's citation of the Port-Royal Logic and Geulincx in the

same phrase of the "Philosophy Notes" does not prove that Beckett was

familiar with the Logic. However, Beckett certainly did follow up an

interest in Geulincx. Beckett's first encounters with Geulincx and the

Cartesians were through his friend from the Ecole Normale, and

philosophical advisor, Jean Beaufret. Beckett wrote to MacGreevy that

Beaufret "comes and talks abstractions every second day and deniche

[unearths] books for me in the library" (Knowlson, 219). Beckett was

intrigued enough by Geulincx to sit in the Long Room of the Trinity College Library in 1936 submerged in the Ethica, making copious notes before turning to Geulincx's Questiones Quodlibeticae and

Metaphyscia (see Uhlmann's introduction to Beckett's notes in

Geulincx, 307). The fact that Beckett had followed up references to read Leibniz, Spinoza and Malebranche (Knowlson, 174; 219; and 334), after familiarising himself with their ideas in his philosophical survey (witnessed in the "Philosophy Notes") demonstrates that Beckett was not only grounding himself in the philosophy of the period, but that he was deeply interested in it. The Jansenists are mentioned in the

"Philosophy Notes" (TCD MS 10967/189r) and in Rachel Burrows' notes to Beckett's TCD MS lectures of 1931 (TCD MS MIC 60); their lived asceticism and learning would surely have appealed to Beckett's

sensibility, and he was clearly devoted to Pascal and Racine. There is a

good chance that Beckett at least acquainted himself with the ideas and

methodology of the Port Royal Logic; it was a seminal text of the

period and one of the most popular books of philosophy in its day. Its

philosophical system offered the skeleton upon which the Port Royal Grammar could lay its claim to the inherently logical order of French syntax, Vordre naturel, and hence fix its grammar as universal. Yet, for Beckett to have had an understanding of the intersection between seventeenth century French philosophy of language and Rationalist ideas of the mind he need not have read Arnauld's Logic and Grammar, for he could have gained an appreciation of the history of Vordre naturel from many other sources than here discussed.

The interdependence of categories of mind and language in

seventeenth-century philosophy is manifested in certain allusions in Comment c'est/How It Is, those which amplify the rhetoric of the novel's "geometric method." This method shapes the desperate attempts of the "I" to organise his 'thought,' even infusing his diction

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Beckett and "l'ordre naturel'

with an aspiration towards the clarity and precision supposed to exist "above in the light." Yet the "I" is estranged from its rational mind and condemned to its ill saying "de bribes" "in bits and scraps." The fall out from this striving is Beckett's highly experimental poetic, an echo chamber of fundamental sounds and rhythms. This 'order' refuses to deliver from on high a classically balanced French sentence, as

"ancient" as those of Molloy, or as syntactically regular as its "last state last version" in the early drafts of Comment c 'est. Towards the end of his sustained reading of Enlightenment thought, Beckett wrote in the April-May 1938 edition of transition, "Art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear and does not make clear" (289).

I am grateful to The Estate of Samuel Beckett for permission to cite from

unpublished material.

Notes

1. In a letter to Hugh Kenner, Beckett specified the voice to be not that of the narrator, but the "narrator/narrated" (Kenner, 94).

2. Beckett's "Philosophy Notes" were taken from Archibald Alexander's 1907 A Short History of Philosophy, Wilhelm Windelband's 1902 edition of A

History of Western Philosophy and John Burnet's 1914 Greek Philosophy, Part I: Thales to Plato. Notes on the Enlightenment period are drawn

exclusively from Windelband. These notes became available in 2002 and are housed in the archives of Trinity College Dublin, and are described and introduced in their catalogue, Notes Diverse Holo (67-89). My quotations from the "Philosophy Notes" cite the TCD MS manuscript number (TCD MS

10967) followed by the page number (recto or verso). My initial research was facilitated by Matthew Feldman's transcriptions from sections of the

"Philosophy Notes," and I sincerely thank Dr Feldman for generously making them available to me. It should be remembered that the archive does, however, offer a deficient picture of Beckett's reading, knowledge and indeed note

taking - the thick Descartes notebook to which Lawrence Harvey refers (34)

is, for instance, lost.

3. This term is drawn from Robert Burton's chapter "Democritus [Junior] to

the Reader" in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1). Beckett's close reading of this

chapter is revealed in Beckett's Dream Notebook.

4. P.J. Murphy believes the "I" below to exercise a certain liberation over

the author-God through a poetic editing of that voice (62-75). Without denying the existence of a poetic in the text, I do not attribute it to the "I" below. My

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Anthony Cordingley

reading ultimately diverges from Murphy's through a different understanding of the novel's conclusion; see my "Psychoanalytic Refuse in Beckett's Comment c 'est/How It Is."

5. Beckett's notes to Geulincx's Ethics, also housed in the archives of the TCD MS library, have been recently translated into English and published together with the first English translation of the Ethics.

6. The irony of the claim is contained in its expression: "je le dis comme je l'entends" is anything but subject-verb-object.

Works Cited

Ackerley, C. J., and S.E. Gontarski, The Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett

(London: Faber, 2006). Arnauld, Antoine and Claude Lancelot, Grammaire generate et raisonnee

(1660) (Menston: Scolar, 1967). -, and Pierre Nicole, La Logique, ou L 'Art de penser (La Logique de Port

Royal) (1662) ed. P. Clair and F. Girbal (Paris: Presses Universitaires de

France, 1965). Beckett, Samuel, "Denis Devlin," transition, no. 27 (April-May 1938), 289. -, "On Murphy," in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic

Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove P, 1984), 113. -, Comment c 'est, How It Is and / et L 'image: A critical-genetic edition / Une

edition critico-genetique, ed. Edouard Magessa O'Reilly (New York:

Routledge, 2001). -, Letters to Barbara Bray, TCD MS 10948, Manuscripts Department, Trinity

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Nicolas K. Kiessling and Rhonda L. Blair (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1989). Cordingley, Anthony, "Psychoanalytic Refuse in Beckett's Comment

c 'est/How It Is," in The Politics and Aesthetics of Refusal, ed. Caroline Hamilton et al. (Manchester: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007).

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College Dublin, with supporting essays" (Amsterdam and New York:

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Vaugelas, Claude Favre de, Remarques sur la langue franqoise (1649), ed. A.

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(London: Macmillan, 1893, 1910).

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