LITERARY CRITICISM:THE IMAGE of the austere Samuel Beckett lecturing on French literature to a group of (mainly female) undergraduate students in Trinity College Dublin between 1930 and 1931 is intriguing on many levels, writes Eamon Maher.
He returned to his alma mater after two years working as an English lecteur at the École Normale Supérieure on Rue d'Ulm in Paris.
As an undergraduate he had come to the attention of Prof Rudmose-Brown who, aware of his prestigious talent, was grooming him for a position in the French department.
During his stay in Paris, Beckett achieved a major coup, the publication of a critical essay, Proust, which was well received. Many critics correctly state that the essay tells us more about the young lecteur than it does about Proust.
The genesis of Beckett Before Beckett is intriguing.
It was quite by accident that Brigitte Le Juez, an international expert on comparative literature in Dublin City University, came across a notebook containing the notes of Beckett's lectures taken by an undergraduate French student, Rachel Burrows.
Le Juez's initial desire had been to find concrete proof that Beckett had read Flaubert. In the Long Room of the Old Library in Trinity, she got the proof she was looking for and a lot more besides.
Burrows's notes, according to Le Juez, are invaluable in assessing Beckett's evolution as a writer: " choice of lecture material reveal his own preferences, where he situated himself in literature, signalling the path he would take after his brief spell as a lecturer."
Beckett had a very poor opinion of himself as a teacher. He felt uncomfortable trying to convey to others things of which he was uncertain himself. In his introductory lecture on Gide, he cites Flaubert and Stendhal as influences. Whereas Beckett admired the impartiality of Flaubert, he was less impressed with Balzac, who, he reckoned, was "the absolute master of his material, he can do what he likes with it, he can foresee and calculate its least vicissitude, he can write the end of his book before he has finished the first paragraph".
His admiration for Gide and the Russian writer Dostoevsky, on the other hand, derives from their daring "to preserve the complexity of the real, the inexplicable, unforeseeable quality of the human being". Liminality, lack of logic, unpredictability are values he associated with writers he admired, and many of his own works share similar traits. Balzac's search for "explanations" for his characters' actions is an attempt to make his plot "plausible".
What appeals to Beckett, particularly in Dostoevsky, is the way he "respects and even protects the dark side of his characters". He goes on: "The novel, far from being an exposition, is a gradual discovery of the real." This is why, for Beckett, Gide's Les Faux-Monnayeurs deliberately avoids the "slice of life" so beloved of the realists in order to depict "that very struggle between what reality offers him and what he himself desires to make of it".
Given his comments in relation to Balzac, it is not surprising to discover Beckett's preference in 17th-century French drama for Racine over Corneille. He stressed "the subconscious" in Racine, his skill at conveying "the solitary nature of every human being".
According to Burrows, Beckett found Corneille "utterly artificial" because of his distorting painting of human beings as they were meant to be. The lack of human morality in Racine's characters was a sign of his modernity.
The repetition of key phrases such as "subconscious", "modern", "impartial", "freedom of the human spirit", the clear attempt to introduce the students to several different authors and to get them to question "givens", reveal that Beckett was a far more gifted teacher than he realised. We owe a debt of gratitude to Brigitte Le Juez for revealing this previously unknown dimension to one of the giants of 20th-century literature.
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Eamon Maher is director of the National Centre for Franco-Irish Studies in IT Tallaght. His most recent monograph, Jean Sulivan (1913-1980): La Marginalité dans la Vie et l'Oeuvre, was published by L'Harmattan earlier this year
Beckett Before Beckett By Brigitte Le Juez Souvenir Press, 80pp. €19