The role of sexuality and tragedy in Samuel Beckett’s work is receiving new attention. Published by Palgrave just last year, Paul Stewart’s Sex and Aesthetics in Samuel Beckett’s Work is finally taking up one of the most underexamined dimensions of Beckett’s plays and novels, and obviously it harks back to the link between Schopenhauer and Beckett. For both writers, sex and eroticism is ambivalent; they find quite as much disgust as joy in erotic union. I’m looking forward to getting to this new entry in the Beckett bibliography, when I have the time. (Ah, for desk and review copies … )

Meanwhile, the systematic study of sex and aesthetics in Schopenhauer, Beckett, and Barker towards a discussion of erotic tragedy in a post-catastrophic age must begin with the wider questions of perception and aesthetics. Arthur Schopenhauer considered his doctoral dissertation On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason an essential prolegomena to his main work; first written in 1813, then vigorously revised in 1847, the essay is overture, and for a work of epistemology it is eminently readable, I recall. In it he presents his first revisions and corrections of Kant’s epistemology, and the later revision is as lucid and witty as his main work itself.

Samuel Beckett’s Proust (1930), his first book publication (which can be found in the fourth volume of the The Selected Works of Samuel Beckett from Grove Press), is famously more about Beckett’s early aesthetics and his debt to Schopenhauer than it is about the author of Remembrance of Things Past. It is perhaps his most important work of aesthetics and criticism, unrivalled in his oeuvre until the “Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit” of 1949. New attention is beginning to focus on the relationship between Schopenhauer’s thinking and Beckett’s work, which along with Beckett’s attitudes towards eroticism is also somewhat undervalued. Gottfried Büttner’s “Schopenhauer’s Recommendations to Beckett,” found in the 2002 issue of Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, and of course Ulrich Pothast’s 2008 The Metaphysical Vision demonstrate the growing interest in this line of criticism in recent years.

I’ll be reading both Fourfold Root and Proust in the next few weeks and hope to comment as I read on.