Beschreibung:
This essay examines Samuel Beckett's first documented approach to the philosophy of Augustine of Hippo, which took place between the end of 1930 and the beginning of 1931, during Beckett's brief return to Trinity College Dublin. There is no doubt that the troubled stage of Beckett's life in which he read E. B. Pusey's epochal translation of the Confessions influenced the selection of the 133 excerpts that Beckett annotated in the ‘Dream’ Notebook and interpolated in his own works. The essay, however, focuses most importantly on the philosophical level of Beckett's encounter with Augustine, considering how Beckett's use of the Confessions as both a primary and a secondary source offered him the opportunity to absorb crucial elements of traditions that include Scepticism, Manichaeism, Neo-Platonism and Christian thought. My overview of the motifs in the excerpts from the ‘Dream’ Notebook consequently challenges our understanding of Beckett's ‘notesnatching’, as well as of his own awareness of the consequences of interpolation, and it reinstates the centrality of the work in textual analysis, pointing at the opportunities offered by intertextual enquiries. Furthermore, I briefly clarify the crucial differences between the 1838 and 1907 editions of Pusey's translation, showing for the first time the lack of evidence that Beckett read a Latin edition of the Confessions at this stage of his life.