6 - Samuel Beckett and Samuel Johnson: Like-minded Masters of Life's Limitations

Summary

Beckett's Subversive and Formative Samuel Johnson

England's greatest moralist, Samuel Johnson, was a devout Christian, renowned for his loyalty to church and state, despite considerable reservations about abuses of power and privilege in the establishment. There was also a well-documented dark underside to his legitimate persona of orthodoxy, masking eccentricities of mind and body that reflected profound fears of insanity, death, damnation, and, worst of all, the possibility of an ultimate nothingness behind reality. Hints of such nihilistic anxieties lurk in favored moral–psychological assumptions: a human being hardly exists in the present but situates the self in the form of flashbacks and flash-forwards—that is, either in a remembered past as a bygone entity or in an imagined future as something in prospect but not yet possessed. As Imlac says in Johnson's Rasselas, “The truth is that no mind is much employed upon the present: recollection and anticipation fill up almost all our moments.” Johnson's overall philosophy of life was decidedly Christian in explaining the human predicament, but he was an uneasy believer, dreading mortality and existential emptiness. At times he perceived a black hole at the center of the here and now, in line with his conviction that life in the present is a void to be filled with past and future apprehensions of existing. No famous modern author was more fascinated by Johnson and his anxieties than was Samuel Beckett. He turned a blind eye to the traditional magisterial figure of the Great Cham. Instead, he focused on a doubt-ridden and phobia-filled figure, a subversive Johnson, wrought in his own nihilistic image and serving as a formative influence on his canon. Such a fellow-feeling developed in the 1930s and after that he attempted to write a fascinating play about this intellectual soul-mate, entitled Human Wishes, which looked ahead to the work of his future fame, especially Waiting for Godot (1948–1949) and Krapp's Last Tape (1958).

Ontological Insecurity and Psychological Vacuity

The heart of Johnson's thinking is found in the magnificent Ramblers of the early 1750s. According to Rambler 2, time present is too often an escape into other temporal zones. Hence, there is little metaphysical being in lived life, which is more a ceaseless becoming: “The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope” (Yale Works, 3:10). Static states of pleasure tend to be impossibilities; all that we have and all that we are verge on fleeting past experiences or unrealized future goals.