On 1 November 1928, the 22-year-old Samuel Beckett presented himself at the hyper-elite École Normale Supérieure in Paris’s Latin Quarter to take up a post as lecteur anglais. He had been nominated for the post by Trinity College Dublin, which had already marked out Beckett as an academic star in his chosen subject of French. He was to spend two years in a sinecure (he had only one pupil) perfecting his French and undertaking research on the novelist and poet Pierre Jean Jouve. It was understood that he would return from Paris bearing considerable research work and be appointed to an earmarked post at Trinity.
Beckett’s lectureship got off to a rocky start. Both he and his French hosts were rather startled to find that his allocated rooms were already occupied by his predecessor, who had not yet bothered to move out. A rather embarrassing moment was resolved when another room was found for the previous lecteur and Beckett moved, slightly later than anticipated, in to his designated rooms. At this point the two Irishmen, Beckett and his new acquaintance Tom MacGreevy, set off to share a drink in one of the neighbouring cafés.
MacGreevy, a poet and art critic, was to become Beckett’s lifelong friend, but he was also an enthusiastic patron, particularly during these two Parisian years. He immediately introduced Beckett to James Joyce, who was toiling endlessly at his “Work in Progress”, which would finally be published in book form as Finnegans Wake in 1939. Joyce was assisted in his labours by a circle of helpers, of which Beckett quickly became a privileged member. Joyce took to his young fellow countryman immediately and went so far as to ask him to contribute to a book praising and explicating “Work in Progress”. These essays were first published in Eugene Jolas’s magazine transition, on the pages of which “Dante… Bruno. Vico… Joyce”, an astonishing tour de force, was Beckett’s first publication. That magazine offered an entry to a whole world of small avant-garde magazines in which Beckett was to publish poetry, prose and translations during his time in Paris.
MacGreevy introduced Beckett to Joyce at the beginning of this first experience of Paris; right at the end he introduced him to Proust. Chatto & Windus had launched a new series of short books on modern writers under its Dolphin imprint, and MacGreevy was already writing on TS Eliot for the series. He was the prime mover in getting Beckett to contribute a volume on Proust.
Slightly surprisingly for one so well read in the moderns, Beckett had never read Proust, and his first reactions were not wholly positive. He wrote to MacGreevy: “There are incomparable things… and then passages that are offensively fastidious, artificial, and almost dishonest… And to think that I have to contemplate him at stool for 16 volumes.” However, his admiration and enthusiasm for Proust grew. As an added bonus, a book on Proust could substitute for the research on Jouve that he had promised for Trinity but quickly abandoned.
Beckett starts where Proust ends with the moment when the narrator of In Search of Lost Time, while waiting to enter a reception of Madame Verdurin, now the Princesse de Guermantes, suffers a series of involuntary memories and the book that we are reading takes form before our eyes. It is the distinction between voluntary and involuntary memory that is, for Beckett, the scaffolding that supports In Search of Lost Time. Time, for Proust, is the most important dimension of our human lives and Beckett evokes it thus: “Yesterday is not a milestone that has been passed, but a daystone on the beaten track of the years and irremediably part of us, within us, heavy and dangerous.”
The way we deal with this dangerous presence within us is habit. Habit is the handmaid of our voluntary memory, rendering our past homogeneous, uniform – in Proust’s own metaphor, the blur of the pages of a photograph album. Voluntary memory misleads about the world of objects, which it renders monochrome and uniform, lacking those diverse borders which situate these objects in a heterogeneous world. More importantly, voluntary memory creates a stable, singular identity in place of the multiple and ever-changing identities that the heterogeneous world of objects summons into being.
Beckett ends this introduction to the architecture of Proust’s novel by recalling the narrator’s involuntary memory of his dead grandmother as he arrives in Balbec for his second stay. As he bends to unfasten his boot he is seized by an image of his grandmother bending over to unbutton his boots on his first arrival in Balbec. The memory fills him with tenderness for his grandmother that had disappeared since her sickness and death. It also brings back to him that self who had loved and adored her, and points the way to the work of art that he must undertake.
In describing Beckett’s work I have given not the slightest inkling of the force and violence of his writing. The first two sentences of the book inform us that Proust’s equation (never defined) identifies the unknown with the unknowable. This identification sets the scene for arguments that use juxtaposition and shock rather than inference and reason. And if logic is wielded like a broadsword, grammar is used with such exaggerated hypotaxis that readers constantly find themselves grasping for sense. The undermining of meaning is taken further both by a vocabulary drenched in polysyllables and, perhaps even more painfully, by an extraordinary range of reference that is neither footnoted nor translated.
In its unsettling use of language, Beckett’s book has some claim to be a rare example of critical modernism (Walter Benjamin might be another practitioner). Although there are tens of thousands of critical works about modernism, almost none of them take a modernist form. This is for the simple reason that the structure of criticism demands a strict hierarchy of discourses – the language of the critic dominates the language of the criticised – while literary modernisms define themselves by refusing those hierarchies. Beckett, however, manages to explain his critical insights into Proust in a prose that refuses simple hierarchies.
It is often said that Beckett’s study of Proust does not have the French author for its subject but Beckett himself. The first reader who came to this judgement was Beckett when he received printed copies of his book. However, rather than presenting us with simple identities Beckett constantly fuses writer and subject by merging Proust’s text with his own.
Time and time again the reader has to check whether they are reading Proust’s words or Beckett’s. Nowhere is this more evident than in one of the book’s central passages, in which Beckett provides, in pages of prose brimming with energy, an account of the narrator’s affair with Albertine. Beckett is at his most brilliant when he both summarises Proust on love and concludes the summary with a quote that is not presented as an explication but as a continuation of a thought. “Love, he insists, can only coexist with a state of dissatisfaction, whether born of jealousy or its predecessor – desire. It represents our demand for a whole. Its inception and its continuance imply the consciousness that something is lacking. ‘One only loves what one does not possess entirely.’”
This strategy means that Beckett can barely find a word of negative criticism for his subject. His dislike of what he first encountered in Proust’s novel finds no echo in the finished book. This, however, seems to be at the price of ignoring much of the subject matter of In Search of Lost Time. The salons in which so much of the novel takes place are barely mentioned. Proust’s long reflections on inversion receive the minimal comment that “homosexuality is never called a vice”. Even a central character, like Charlus, receives only a scant paragraph.
There are many differences between this very young Beckett and the middle-aged author of the great trilogy of novels and Waiting for Godot. Most striking is his belief, which he takes without reservation from Proust’s closing volume, Time Regained, and with which he closes his study, in the redemptive force of art. It will take two decades and a world war for Beckett to abandon redemption in favour of an ineluctable drive to continue.
Faber & Faber is to be congratulated on republishing Beckett’s Proust but, while intervening footnotes and translations would have been a violation, it would have been easy to add a couple of pages of endnotes with the necessary information. Although the publishers did make some reparation by commissioning a foreword by Eimear McBride that is both elegant and thoughtful.
Nearly 100 years from its original publication, Beckett’s first book still merits attention. It is an informative witness to avant-garde Paris in 1930, a brilliant commentary on Proust and a bravura display of inventive writing. Beckett was never to write another work of literary criticism. He returned, having finished his monograph, to Dublin and his lectureship at Trinity College. But he didn’t last a year. He suffered a breakdown, abandoned the lectures, which he loathed, and resigned his post by telegram.
Colin MacCabe’s books include James Joyce: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press)
Proust
Samuel Beckett
Faber & Faber
96pp, £8.99
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[Further reading: Fecund, eclectic, and freaky-deke]
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This article appears in the 29 Jul 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The new terror
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