Though most criticism has studied Schopenhauer’s philosophy in regard to the early Samuel Beckett of Proust and Murphy, after Beckett’s immersion in Schopenhauer’s work in the early 1930s, Ulrich Pothast notes that Beckett revisited the philosopher in the late 1970s and early 1980s, years during which he engaged in a quasi-systematic re-reading of Schopenhauer’s work (any reading which includes the rather dry epistemology of On the Fourfold Root of Sufficient Reason must have been quasi-systematic; as Pothast notes, “I do not know of any other artist who, like Samuel Beckett, would not have been content with reading Schopenhauer’s standard writings … but would undertake the considerable effort to read and understand a systematically relevant but in fact … rather dry book like On the Fourfold Root” Pothast 16). Many of Beckett’s notes of that period on Schopenhauer’s philosophy were written in Beckett’s Sottisier notebook, now in the Reading University Library, between July 1979 and December 1980.

Pothast’s The Metaphysical Vision discusses Schopenhauer’s thought in relation to Beckett’s work only through Waiting for Godot, but the writer’s late 1970s study of Schopenhauer suggests an avenue into the great works of Beckett’s final period: from 1979′s Company through 1987′s Stirrings Still, and encompassing the final stage work from Rockaby (1980) through What Where (1983). These works especially evidence the Schopenhauerian conception of the artistic process as the creation of works for disinterested contemplation and meditation. While it was never Beckett’s intention at any point in his career to put Schopenhauer’s thought into fiction and drama, echoes of the philosopher’s work find their way into not only the content but also the form of this final work, which includes what Ruby Cohn in A Beckett Canon called “The Beckett Masterwork,” Ill Seen Ill Said. The subject-object relation of the listener and the storyteller in Ohio Impromptu; the viciousness of the will acting through the body in both Catastrophe and What Where; the ceaseless thrumming of the tortured consciousness seeking only a peace in nothingness of Stirrings Still — all of these suggest that Schopenhauer was perhaps the most pervasive philosophical influence on Beckett during his last decade, an influence that was after all life-long.

Like Schopenhauer’s philosophy, Beckett’s work is neither optimistic nor pessimistic: like Schopenhauer’s philosophy, however, it might be considered “anti-optimistic,” sharing the quality of dark compassion for the suffering and the dead, optimism as an “absurd, wicked way of thought, a bitter mockery of the unspeakable suffering of human kind,” and it provides no hope for redemption in this world. (I would suggest that this “anti-optimism” is also a central trait of Howard Barker’s plays.) In the final analysis, Billie Whitelaw’s sighed “fuck life” of Rockaby is indeed resignation and contemplation, not itself angry or bitter, useless values in a world which can be no different than what it is. The tortured expressions of Beckett’s speakers reflect their tortured bodied experience, however quiet and whispered: a strain of genius shared by philosopher and poet alike. And a difficult accomplishment, however necessary.