Mystic Paths, Inward Turns

Abstract

This chapter expands upon the Christian themes introduced in the previous chapter. It identifies intertextual discourse with the Psalms, Early Church Fathers, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine and certain neo-Platonists. It explores the importance of desert mysticism and notions of ascesis within the novel, and links this with multiple allusions to the inward turn or practised indifference of seventeenth-century Rationalists, notably Malebranche and Geulincx, and Quietists such as Fénelon, or the philosophy of Spinoza. How It Is is then argued to be Beckett’s most sustained engagement with Geulingian ethics. When Beckett draws on mysticism, Rationalism, Occasionalism and the conceptualisation of freewill in each, he is shown to thematize artistic originality and the agency of narrative voice, its relationship to the authorial voice.