Abstract

I examine the Nietzschean stance underlying Beckett's arguments against academic art criticism and ask whether any form of "logical" discourse could be reconcilable with what Beckett calls "modern" art. ;In chapter I, I recapitulate the distillation of Nietzsche's critique of 'knowledge' which underlies Beckett's writing. In this critique, inherited logic, language, consciousness, truth are called into question and the artist is the one who squanders this inheritance. ;In chapter II, I explore why Beckett believed that art was meant for the "amateur sans garantie" rather than the art critic. Five types of what Nietzsche called "advantages," and Beckett called "garantie," suggest why academic critics might cling to the 'knowledge' structures Nietzsche and Beckett sought to dismantle. ;In chapter III, I examine two Beckett texts which address the fundamental incompatibility between Beckett's "modern" art and professional criticism: that criticism is not about need, and art is only about need. Beckett claims that there are "two needs" which generate art, and that the artist must situate herself in a double-bind between the two needs. I attempt to elucidate what Beckett meant by the "two needs" and I speculate about Beckett's particular "type of need." ;In chapter IV, I examine Beckett's "own type of need" and consider the strategies of Beckett's resistance to logic, language, conscious thought, 'truth,' especially as they emerge in opposition to the "guarantees." The artist who attempts to repudiate the guarantees of knowledge, to live in a perpetual double-bind of needs is doomed to failure--language cannot help but link, represent and affirm--but the strategies of Beckett's failure remain a challenge to all standard uses of language as a means to truths. ;I present Beckett's short prose work neither as an experiment by Beckett in non-discursive, non-expository art criticism. I suggest that neither should encourage us to explore new modes which are neither 'art' nor 'criticism.' ;Finally, Beckett's resistance to "incorporation"--into language or into herd--acquires a new force seen against the rise of European fascism which marked Beckett's youth. It is against the backdrop of fascist 'sublimation' of self into the collective that the failure to relate became one of the "needs" in Beckettian art